canada.com » Televisionhttp://o.canada.com
Canada's great, shareable storiesWed, 04 Mar 2015 00:14:42 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/http://1.gravatar.com/blavatar/15edae77ebfa450ee5bb897103fdef31?s=96&d=http%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.png » Televisionhttp://o.canada.com
Ming-Na Wen and Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. return to TVhttp://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/ming-na-wen-and-marvels-agents-of-s-h-i-e-l-d-return-to-tv
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/ming-na-wen-and-marvels-agents-of-s-h-i-e-l-d-return-to-tv#commentsMon, 02 Mar 2015 18:44:03 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=594981]]>It’s been almost three months since Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. aired a new episode, and on Tuesday, March 3, the drought’s finally over. The superhero-driven drama returns to CTV/ABC with an instalment titled Aftershocks, and it’s just as action-packed as fans have come to expect.

Calvin (Kyle MacLachlan) is seeking revenge against Coulson (Clark Gregg), while both Raina (Ruth Negga) and Skye (Chloe Bennet) are struggling with transformations into something inhuman courtesy of the Obelisk.

Ming-Na Wen, who plays ace pilot and weapons expert Melinda May, spoke about the upcoming episodes, May and Coulson’s relationship and the epic fight sequence that took three days to film.

Q: What can you tell us about the midseason premiere?

A: It pretty much picks up where we left off. It’s a deeper exploration of what is happening to Skye, and I don’t even think she’s aware of what’s going on. Our fans know she’s inhuman, but when we come back you get to see all of us exploring and discovering that.

Q: A lot of fans love the relationship between May and Coulson. Do you think things could get romantic?

A: Coulson and May have a very special bond and an incredibly deep friendship and history together, and a sense of loyalty. They’re both wounded soldiers, and who knows what that could lead to? I know we have a lot of Philinda fans out there, and I’m one of them. I think that there’s a real possibility for them. But they’re professionals, so they don’t want to make things complicated.

Q: A lot of fans loved the Face My Enemy episode in October, with Coulson and May’s ballroom dance scene. Did either of you have a background in dance beforehand?

A: That was a very special episode. I’ve had dance training and Clark has moves, but neither of us has ever trained for ballroom dancing, so we worked really hard at making ourselves look smooth. We had a blast doing it. And let me tell you, dancing in that silver dress, it’s not hot in the sense of “Oh, dang! She’s hot!” — it was hot in the sense of sweating, and I felt like I was a chicken with tin foil wrapped around me.

Q: That episode was also important for May because she had that big fight with Agent 33, who took on May’s appearance. How did you prepare to play both parts?

A: For that particular fight scene, my stunt double and I had to learn both sides. I think we put in a good five to 10 hours just learning all the moves before filming. Then we took a good three days to film the fight sequence.

Q: May is one of most respected members in the team. To what extent do you feel that comics are welcoming to powerful female characters?

A: I think Marvel excels at it. There’s just such a need for strong female role models, and I love that on our show we have pretty much all the age brackets as well. It’s not just all these teenagers or 20-somethings running around. There’s just a respect for strong females, and I’m really proud of our show for showcasing that.

Q: None of the SHIELD characters were in the Marvel comics or films, except for Coulson. Did you worry about how the Marvel fans would react to the show?

A: There’s always the concern about acceptance from our Marvel fans, because they are such diehard fans. But I love the fact that now our characters have their own comic books. It’s crazy. For a geek girl like me, that’s pretty high up there in satisfying a nerd’s dream.

Q: You also did the titular character’s voice in the Disney movie Mulan. Who’s the tougher female character – Mulan or Melinda May?

A: A lot of people used to joke that Mulan might have been an ancestor or descendent of May, so in that sense Mulan would be more kick-ass, but between the two it’s a tough call. I think Mulan was cool because she was younger and more feisty and self-discovering. For May, it’s more about trying to compartmentalize her past so she can function, so I think it’s a deeper character with deeper struggles.

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/ming-na-wen-and-marvels-agents-of-s-h-i-e-l-d-return-to-tv/feed0MING-NA WENmhank2012agents of shieldGangland Undercover a fast-paced, fact-based ridehttp://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/gangland-undercover-a-fast-paced-fact-based-ride
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/gangland-undercover-a-fast-paced-fact-based-ride#commentsFri, 27 Feb 2015 22:21:51 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=594676]]>History’s new six-part miniseries Gangland Undercover may be about a California motorcycle gang and its life-and-death exploits, but don’t call it Sons of Anarchy.

The Canadian-American co-production is based on informant Charles Falco’s 2013 book titled Vagos, Mongols and Outlaws: My Infiltration of America’s Deadliest Biker Gangs. There are bikes and beatings, yes, and drugs and dames, but actors Paulino Nunes and Damon Runyan say there’s a key difference.

“We follow the infiltration of a gang as opposed to the business practices of a gang,” says Runyan, who plays Falco. “But I do think that if you like gritty drama that is fact-based and has the engine revving full throttle the whole time, it’s the type of show that would appeal to you.”

The real-life Falco, who was privately contracted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, spent almost three years infiltrating the Vagos gang. He rose in the ranks until he was second to only the president of the Victorville, Calif., chapter.

“We’ve all heard infiltration stories, undercover stories, but this kind of infiltration was so much more intense in that he had no backup. And the rigours of being a prospect, which is what you do to get your full patch, are just insane,” says Nunes, who plays chapter president Schizo.

“The members are sleep deprived, they’re drinking, they’re doing drugs and they get into this altered state. Falco had to exist in this altered state with all these unpredictable guys around him, with the constant threat of violence.”

Gangland Undercover star Paulino Nunes [Darren Goldstein/DSG Photo.]

After that job, Falco infiltrated two more motorcycle clubs — the Mongols and Outlaws — and became the only private contractor in the world to do so. All told, his work resulted in 62 arrests of members for various crimes, including murder.

Falco was on hand during filming for Gangland Undercover in Toronto and Arizona, and his presence on the set — and that of the members of the real-life, law-abiding Iron Order Motorcycle Club — helped ensure authenticity. Falco also told stories and showed pictures from his days undercover.

“I was struck by how warm Falco was — he was a really, really friendly guy. He had a photo album from his days with the Vagos, and it was fascinating to see who the characters were that we’d read about,” says Nunes.

“A lot of the photos were from one of the runs where they’d basically have a trailer party. It looked like some big family reunion — they were just sitting around on their little lawn chairs, drinking some beers. The only difference was when someone was taking a picture of them, they’d give them the finger.”

Nunes and Runyan’s own families were less enthusiastic about the actors riding the open road. After all, as one of the show’s advisers told them, the most dangerous thing about infiltrating a gang is the act of riding a motorcycle.

Gangland Undercover star Damon Runyan [Darren Goldstein/DSG Photo.]

“When I booked the part, I actually got into a massive argument with my wife in regards to buying a motorcycle. She wanted none of it, and I knew that in order to fulfil this role I had to ride a bike,” says Runyan.

Nunes, however, had more experience.

“I did some riding in the Azores about 18 years ago and hadn’t ridden a lot up until about six or seven years ago. I got a scooter, which was the way that I avoided having a big confrontation with my wife,” he says, adding that he traded up to a Honda Shadow Spirit 750 a few years later.

Thankfully there were no motorcycle accidents during the filming of Gangland Undercover, but the actors did have some difficulty with two pesky elements — dust and wind.

“Both Damon and I were wearing aviator sunglasses, which was fine when we were filming in Canada,” says Nunes. “But then when we went down to Arizona, we were riding along dusty highways at about 85 km/h, and that wind whips around those Aviators and dust gets in your eyes, a lot of dirt. It was a little bit hairy.”

Gangland Undercover debuts Monday, March 2, on History

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/gangland-undercover-a-fast-paced-fact-based-ride/feed0Gangland Undercovermhank2012Gangland Undercover Gangland UndercoverHouse of Cards: 5 things to expect in Season 3 (with video)http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/house-of-cards-5-things-to-expect-in-season-3-with-video
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/house-of-cards-5-things-to-expect-in-season-3-with-video#commentsFri, 27 Feb 2015 15:43:39 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=594377]]>Fans who’ve been patiently waiting for Season 3 of House of Cards — and who haven’t checked out the spoilers gained from its accidental leak onto Netflix a couple weeks ago — will finally be rewarded with fresh instalments of the high-stakes, low-morality drama.

All 13 episodes will hit the streaming service this Friday, with the nefarious Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) newly installed as president of the United States after Garrett Walker’s (Michel Gill) untimely resignation.

Here are five things to expect from the premiere, but be warned — if you don’t want to know what happens, stop reading now. Spoilers ahead.

1. Frank’s up to his old chicanery again

The new season opens with Frank leading a motorcade to his father’s grave to pay his respects. “I have to do these sort of things now,” he drawls. “Makes me seem more human. And you have to be a little human when you’re the president.”

Lest you think that ol’ Frank has gone softer than a southern belle in need of smelling salts, he douses the tombstone with urine when no one’s looking.

Later, he reveals he appointed a strategic vice-president and fires an adviser who dares question his new initiative. If there are three things that are certain in House of Cards, it’s death, taxes and Frank Underwood’s ruthlessness.

Kevin Spacey in Season 3 of House of Cards [Netflix]

2. Doug’s alive, but he’s not yet kicking

The poor chief-of-staff (Michael Kelly) found out the hard way that love hurts, when Rachel (Rachel Brosnahan) beat him unconscious with a brick in the Season 2 finale. Though viewers thought he was dead, it turns out that he’s just badly injured and in a hospital recovering.

Without pills to dull the pain — he’s considered at-risk because of his alcoholic past — Doug does much wincing and wailing, and at one point makes a homemade splint with duct tape. He’s still stuck on Rachel, though, and does some digging to try and hunt her down.

3. Stephen Colbert has a guest spot

Though Colbert left The Colbert Report in December, the satirical news show lives on in House of Cards. As Frank appears as a guest to promote his new national employment plan, Colbert grills the president like a rib-eye steak, reminding him that unemployment rates are up and 80 per cent of Americans think Frank lacks effectiveness.

You can’t help but bemoan the current Colbert-less TV landscape, but on the upside, it’s mere months until the Peabody-winning comedian re-emerges as the new host of The Late Show.

Robin Wright in Season 3 of House of Cards [Netflix]

4. Claire is even more ambitious

The president’s wife (Robin Wright) has always had ambition, and this season she’s pushing for Frank to announce her nomination for ambassador. But she isn’t stopping there. She tells him her sights are set on the presidency, you know, just in case Frank isn’t a shoo-in for the 2016 election.

The move could hint at a subtle crack in their relationship and her loyalty to Frank — could she be crafting her own secret schemes under that well-coiffed hairdo of hers?

5. Underwood is an underdog

With terrible approval ratings and both Republicans and Democrats refusing to give him a bill he can sign, Frank faces a tough road to the 2016 election. The first matter of business? Getting his employment program off the ground and winning the trust of the American people.

But Frank never lacked for determination. With steely e yes, he tells his wife, “I will not be a placeholder president, Claire. I will win and I will leave a legacy.” Knock on wood. Twice.

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/house-of-cards-5-things-to-expect-in-season-3-with-video/feed0Kevin Spacey in House of Cardsmhank2012Kevin Spacey in House of CardsRobin Wright in House of CardsWill Charlie be on Two and a Half Men’s finale? (with video)http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/will-charlie-be-on-two-and-a-half-mens-finale-with-video
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/will-charlie-be-on-two-and-a-half-mens-finale-with-video#commentsWed, 18 Feb 2015 20:41:22 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=592455]]>Two and a Half Men may not be the classiest show on TV, but it’s good for a laugh and has been around long enough that it’s welcome in its ubiquity.

And on Thursday, after 12 seasons and 262 episodes, the CBS comedy will crack wise — or at least of average intelligence — for the last time.

Two and a Half Men’s final outing will be a two-part hour-long affair and, says CBS, the many guest stars will be surprises. But the big question is whether Charlie Sheen, who played hedonistic himbo Charlie Harper, will resurface on the series he called home for eight seasons.

The episode’s title teases as much — it’s called Of Course He’s Dead — but after Sheen’s tiger blood-fuelled falling out with creator Chuck Lorre in March 2011, who knows whether Charlie Harper and his sizable bowling shirt collection will return for a final farewell.

Charlie was written out of the show with his stalker Rose (Melanie Lynskey) implying that he was “accidentally” hit by a train while on vacation in Paris.

Could Charlie reappear in a dream sequence? A flashback? As his own long-lost twin? Or did he somehow survive his fate?

Ashton Kutcher, left, and Jon Cryer behind the scenes of CBS’s Two and a Half Men. [CBS]

No one knows whether Angus T. Jones — the “half” man in the show’s title — will return either, but there’s far less buzz around that. Jones eventually left the show after publicly deriding Two and Half Men as “filth” and made his last appearance as Jake Harper at the end of Season 10.

“The show has been many things over 12 years; it’s really two shows if you think about it,” Lorre, who also juggles CBS shows Mom, The Big Bang Theory and Mike & Molly, recently told The Hollywood Reporter.

“There were eight years with Charlie Sheen and four years with Ashton Kutcher. They’re very different — a different energy and dynamic.

“The show, for better or worse, has a great deal of scandal attached to it. There’s no getting away from it. It’s part of the DNA of the show. I wanted the finale to take it all in and not ignore any of those elements.”

Kutcher made his first appearance as rich guy Walden Schmidt in Season 9, and this year’s storylines had him marrying Charlie’s brother Alan (Jon Cryer) in order to adopt a child, six-year-old Louis (Edan Alexander). In last week’s episode, they signed their divorce papers.

Cryer, for his part, was the glue that kept Two and a Half Men together for the duration. The only original cast member left standing (who’s also known as Duckie in the 1986 film Pretty in Pink) won two Emmy Awards for his portrayal in 2009 and 2012.

Ashton Kutcher, left, Chuck Lorre and Jon Cryer behind the scenes on Two and a Half Men [CBS]

Though a ratings hit, with an average of 13 million U.S. viewers tuning in weekly during its run, the show never found quite as much love with critics. In fact, Cryer and guest star Kathy Bates, who played Charlie in one of Alan’s hospital-bed hallucinations, were the only ones who received Emmys for their onscreen work.

Uncredited, but just as important to Two and a Half Men’s success, are countless fart jokes, sex jokes, put-downs and general raunch.

In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, Cryer said he was amazed at which jokes were able to make it past the censors and onto the air.

“We had a butt-plug-of-the-month joke, and what was amazing was that it was originally much more graphic,” he said.

But, butt plugs aside, he acknowledged his gratitude to fans for tuning in — repeatedly, in some cases, as Two and a Half Men encore episodes always seem to be airing on some channel somewhere.

“Man, if I had a nickel for the amount of times that people tell me that every night they watch the reruns and how much they love it,” he said. “The fact that we became a staple in people’s homes has been an incredible gift and it is not something that we ever took for granted.”

And 2015 seems a prime time to play the imitation game — new versions of All in the Family, The X-Files, Bewitched, The Greatest American Hero, Married … With Children and The Courtship of Eddie’s Father are all in the works.

On Thursday, another new show inspired by an old show debuts. Matthew Perry and Thomas Lennon star in The Odd Couple, based on the 1970s series starring Tony Randall and Jack Klugman, which in turn was based on the 1965 Neil Simon play starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. (Numerous other versions, including an all-female one, have also mined the premise.)

Perry pulls double duty on the series, acting as an executive producer and starring as the slob of the twosome, recently divorced sportswriter Oscar Madison. Perry’s Oscar works from home in his underwear, has a wall covered in televisions and employs an assistant played by Yvette Nicole Brown of Community.

As if hammering home his inherent slovenliness, Oscar sniffs an old hoagie he finds in his apartment, bites it and tosses the remainder on a nearby chair, cueing “ewwws!” and giggles from the over-enthusiastic audience. Indeed, as Felix remarks, he’s “so lazy his idea of multitasking is peeing in the shower.”

The Odd Couple stars Matthew Perry, left, and Thomas Lennon [CBS]

There’s an underlying sense of frustration about Oscar, and Friends fans will recognize the deadpan delivery, sarcasm and occasional wild gesturing of Perry’s character Chandler Bing.

It’s fitting, since The Odd Couple is Perry’s first headlining TV project since Friends that goes for a broadly comedic, three-camera format. (May you rest in peace, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Mr. Sunshine and Go On.)

Lennon’s persnickety Felix, on the other hand, cooks vegan food, does yoga and plays cello. No, he’s not gay, as Oscar’s friends assume, seemingly unaware of the narrow stereotype they’re employing. Lennon commits to the character, also newly divorced and Oscar’s new roommate, mugging with aplomb and even striking a gravity-defying pose near the episode’s end.

Lennon and Perry have an easy chemistry — the two starred together in the 2009 film 17 Again, after all — and it counteracts some of the heavier-landing lines, like one describing Oscar’s messy apartment: “Wow, so this is where the garbage chute goes.”

In fact, the best line in the pilot is taken from the original play and involves Felix’s initials: F.U. (Perry acknowledged as much in a recent appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman.)

The Odd Couple isn’t the type of boundary-pushing programming that defines the current Golden Era of TV, but it does find a good comedic rhythm.

The show is also a good fit for CBS since it borrows a lot of the mismatched-pair humour of the network’s 2 Broke Girls, now in its fourth season. Plus, CBS has had a lot of luck with reboots — Hawaii Five-0 is a consistent ratings grabber, as is the Sherlock Holmes-inspired drama Elementary.

There’s enough here that fans of the 1970s series will be intrigued by this updated Odd Couple, with its familiar jaunty theme song and retro-infused opening graphics. The Kids in the Hall alumnus Dave Foley, in the rinse cycle now that Canadian sitcom Spun Out is on hiatus, also makes an appearance.

The Odd Couple could find an even keel in future episodes, and CBS is likely to give it an ample shot since the network’s Two and a Half Men and The Mentalist are signing off for good this week.

But even if it doesn’t succeed, there’s always another classic TV show waiting for an enterprising network executive to try, try it again.

The Odd Couple debuts Thursday, Feb. 19, on CTV/CBS

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/the-odd-couple-remake-stars-matthew-perry-as-beloved-slob/feed0The Odd Couplemhank2012The Odd Couple The Odd CoupleX Company tells true tales of Canadian espionage in World War II (with video)http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/x-company-tells-true-tales-of-canadian-espionage-in-world-war-ii-with-video
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/x-company-tells-true-tales-of-canadian-espionage-in-world-war-ii-with-video#commentsTue, 17 Feb 2015 21:20:25 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=591996]]>High-stakes espionage and covert missions may not be the first things that come to mind when you think of Lake Ontario, but CBC’s new drama X Company proves that you can make waves from even the most benign-seeming locales.

Set during the Second World War, X Company centres on five skilled young recruits of various backgrounds — Canadian, American and British — who leave their everyday lives to train as agents in a secret facility dubbed Camp X, a spy school on the border of Whitby and Oshawa, Ont.

Morgenstern: The Second World War is an epic backdrop to put any kind of drama in, and it’s considered one of the last noble wars, where the good guys faced off against the bad guys and the good guys won.

But we wanted to dig deeper into questions like, what does it mean to be a good guy? What does it mean to be a bad guy? What is it to be a hero? And rather that to take it from the point of view of epic battlefields and all of the vistas that we’re accustomed to seeing, we wanted to make it intimate, dirty, euphoric and personal.

Q: What specifically about the war does the show focus on?

Ellis: The story’s also about the origins of spycraft, the origins of modern spycraft, really. The war that these young people fought was very different. It’s set at a time when it really did feel that the allies were going to lose. The map was black, the thousand-year Reich was looking like a reality. And when you’re out there as a field agent, and there’s no line of troops over your shoulder, no one about to come in and help you out, you’re there on your own getting your hands dirty.

Q: What did you do to keep the show authentic to the time?

Ellis: We did a lot of reading and watched a lot of movies and documentaries and did all that great due diligence, but we also surrounded ourselves with writers who knew that era really well. One of our writers, Hannah Moscovitch, is a very well known, well regarded, award-winning playwright who’s written extensively in the themes of war and on the time period. There’s also the few people that we’ve been lucky enough to meet, and also stories of our families. We both have German and French and Jewish family, so we’re trying to tell those stories as well.

Evelyne Brochu, plays Aurora in X Company [CBC]

Q: It’s nice to see Canadian, British and American characters all working together, in one spot.

Morgenstern: This was a school that bridged through all nationalities of people who were on the side of the allies. There was nowhere else for Americans to train at the time, so they came to Canada to train. Canada was picked and this place close to Toronto was picked, so there’s a vast multilingual, multicultural pool to draw from.

Q: What are some of the stories viewers can look forward to?

Morgenstern: One of the main tasks of these agents would’ve been sabotage. They sometimes have to turn into an assassination squad, do subversion, morale operations and rescue airmen who have fallen into occupied land and they have to get them out to safety.

Ellis: But the story’s also rooted in its central character, Alfred Graves (Jack Laskey), a man who has a super-rare version of synesthesia, he has total synesthesia. Essentially, all five of his senses are fused together, so he can’t hear a sound without him also having a smell, a taste and feel it on his skin. It makes his world completely overwhelming, but it’s also given him a near-perfect memory.

The allies recognize this gift and they try to turn it into a tool in the field. But this incredibly sheltered man is not accustomed to stepping out into the street, much less into the arena of war. So it’s about how a team of agents support him, and his coming of age and how he ultimately rises above his limitations to use what he sees as a curse as essentially a gift and a tool to help in the war.

X Company debuts Wednesday, Feb. 18, on CBC

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/x-company-tells-true-tales-of-canadian-espionage-in-world-war-ii-with-video/feed0X Companymhank2012X CompanyX CompanySaving Hope’s season finale is ‘emotional’ and ‘shocking,’ says starhttp://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/saving-hopes-season-finale-is-emotional-and-shocking-says-star
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/saving-hopes-season-finale-is-emotional-and-shocking-says-star#commentsTue, 17 Feb 2015 21:05:08 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=592047]]>The Season 3 finale of Saving Hope is so breathtaking that fans of the Canadian medical series might just need a respirator themselves after they watch it.

The episode airing Wednesday is a game-changer for the staff at Hope Zion Hospital, so much so that actor Benjamin Ayres (Dr. Zach Miller) couldn’t believe that the show was actually going through with the pivotal story point.

“It’s very emotional and very shocking, and I don’t think anybody’s going to see it coming. When I got the script originally and read it, I thought there was no way this is going to happen. When we were filming it, I thought, ‘This is not happening.’ When I watched it last week, even, I said, ‘I can’t believe this is going to happen,’” he says.

“It’s life and death, and there’s something beautiful about it. It’s a beautiful, beautiful story and it’s going to set up Season 4.”

Though the British Columbia-born actor couldn’t get into specifics about what happens to whom, he had some definite ideas about how he’d like to see his character react.

“It’s a big jumping off point from Season 3 because now there are many places the show can go. Now, is the show going to pick up exactly from where we dropped off? I don’t know. I think it’s going to take Zach to much darker places, and I’m excited to see how he deals with the darkness of the situation that occurred and how he feels responsible for it in some ways,” Ayres says.

Saving Hope [CTV/Bell]

“Is that going to push him further away from Melanda (his girlfriend played by Glenda Braganza)? I’d like to see that happen and then him go in the completely opposite direction and be with all kinds of girls and try to figure out who he is now and who he was and whether he was keeping his real self at bay for so long.”

As it is, Season 3 offered fans a look at Zach’s backstory and answered some lingering questions about the efficient ER doctor.

“We got to learn more about Zach and his life at home with his two kids and his divorced wife and his father, which was a fantastic episode,” Ayres says. “I really liked getting to learn that Zach had to deal with his father dying as a teenager and that his father was keeping the secret that he’d had cancer, and that Zach didn’t necessarily get to say the things he would’ve wanted to.”

Saving Hope also stars Erica Durance, Michael Shanks and Daniel Gillies, and it is nominated at the Canadian Screen Awards for a Golden Screen Award — in a newly established category dedicated to Canada’s most-watched homegrown shows. The ceremony will air live March 1 on CBC.

“I think the hardest thing with any show starting out is getting the audience, and I think we’ve done a really great job of creating a human emotional drama that speaks to everybody,” says Ayres, who also plays Eric Blake on HBO Canada’s Less Than Kind.

“My parents love Saving Hope, and not even because I’m on the show. Friends of mine love it, and not because I’m on the show. It really deals with life and death and relationships.”

Saving Hope’s Season 3 finale airs Wednesday, Feb. 18, CTV

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/saving-hopes-season-finale-is-emotional-and-shocking-says-star/feed0Saving Hopemhank2012Saving HopeThe Walking Dead’s Christian Serratos reacts to onscreen shocker (with video)http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/the-walking-deads-christian-serratos-reacts-to-onscreen-shocker-with-video
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/the-walking-deads-christian-serratos-reacts-to-onscreen-shocker-with-video#commentsFri, 13 Feb 2015 19:33:08 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=591387]]>The Walking Dead has barely staggered into the second half of its fifth season, and already fans are reeling from the death of Tyreese (Chad L. Coleman) — a gruesome zombie fatality that happened a mere episode after the death of Beth (Emily Kinney).

Things aren’t quite as bad for Christian Serratos’s character Rosita, but they’re not all flowers and fun either. Her relationship with Abraham (Michael Cudlitz) is showing its strain, and Eugene (Josh McDermitt) has confessed that he’s not a scientist after all, killing hope that his knowledge of diseases could help save the group.

Serratos was on hand to talk about the post-apocalyptic drama, the cult of secrecy on the set and the heavy physical toll of playing her character.

Q: What was your reaction when you found out that Tyreese was going to die in the Season 5B premiere, especially so soon after Beth?

A: We all get a call when either you or somebody else will be going, so you never really know what’s going to happen or what the outcome of that phone call is going to be. I think we all got the news of both of them in the same phone call.

We’re used to hearing about just one person leaving, but as soon as the shock settled with one, we were told we’re also going to lose somebody else. It was a double whammy for all of us.

Christian Serratos as Rosita Espinosa in The Walking Dead [AMC]

Q: Where is Rosita’s relationship with Abraham now? Is she afraid of him?

A: I don’t think she’s necessarily afraid of him. I think you go through ups and downs with everybody you meet in this world, and this is just one of their probably many downs. It’s hard to keep your brain at ease in a world like they live in, to keep your sanity.

But I think both of them are strong enough and capable enough to travel those minefields and know which buttons not to push with each other. Because you only have each other — you can’t really push each other away. You have to fight for the little that you have.

Q: How deeply was Rosita affected by Eugene lying about being a scientist?

A: They’re all losing something so important. They’re losing the possibility of a normal life and the idea of the world that they knew, so I think they’re all pretty traumatized right now.

But like I said, these people go through ups and downs, and this is a down. And they’re going to get through it, and they’re going to find another way, and they’re going to remain hopeful. Because that’s what the show is inevitably about and that’s what these people need to survive — hope.

Josh McDermitt as Eugene, left, and Christian Serratos as Rosita in The Walking Dead [AMC]

Q: How did having Rosita in the Walking Dead comic books affect how you played her?

A: It’s definitely nice having basically a manual on how to act out whatever character you’re trying to play. But I just feel like Rosita comes out of me naturally. I feel that she has a sass that maybe I always wanted to live out on a day-to-day basis.

Q: Are we going to find out more about Rosita’s backstory in this half of the season?

A: I want that for the fans, I really do, but it’s something that I feel if I said anything, it would be a spoiler, so I guess we’ll just have to watch and find out.

Q: How secretive are things on set?

A: I’ve worked on projects that have been super-top secret, and we all have to be told ‘don’t say anything’ and sign confidentiality agreements and all that jazz. On The Walking Dead, there are hundreds of us, but it feels like a small family creating this big, big show. So none of us want to say anything. We feel like it’s our little secret and we just want to do a good job and we don’t want to spoil it for anyone.

Q: What kind of training did you do to prepare for physically playing Rosita?

A: Like an idiot, I did nothing. I knew it was going to be a taxing role. I knew it was going to take a lot out of me emotionally and physically, and I did not do any sort of preparation. I remember on my first day of filming I went home and just couldn’t move. I essentially needed an ice bath, I was so sore.

I don’t think people realize that even just walking from our chairs to the set can be exhausting because we’re running on no sleep, the elements are brutal, it’s like 112 degrees and we’re carrying heavy, heavy equipment — all the guns and knives and weaponry and harnesses.

So working on this production I’ve learned to take way better care of myself. The other actors share health tips and new ways of eating every day and we all cook for each other at home, so it’s actually helped me out a lot.

‘I don’t think people realize that even just walking from our chairs to the set can be exhausting’

Q: Should there be a zombie apocalypse, do you think you would be prepared now?

A: I think I’d be more prepared, but I don’t necessarily think that I should be the one that everyone should come running to!

Q: There are entire Tumblrs dedicated to Tara and Rosita — what are your thoughts on their relationship?

A: I don’t know what it is that people see on screen, but me and Alanna (Masterson) are good friends. So I think people see that, maybe on our social media, and go from there. But we all laugh about the things that fans say. It’s always very fun to see people’s perspectives and ideas.

The Walking Dead airs Sundays, AMC

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/the-walking-deads-christian-serratos-reacts-to-onscreen-shocker-with-video/feed1The Walking Deadmhank2012The Walking DeadThe Walking DeadThe Walking DeadAscension a ’60s-inspired murder mystery in spacehttp://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/ascension-a-60s-inspired-murder-mystery-in-space
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/ascension-a-60s-inspired-murder-mystery-in-space#commentsFri, 06 Feb 2015 20:01:44 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=589617]]>In the first few moments of CBC’s new sci-fi miniseries Ascension, a television shows a woman looking directly at the camera, playing a sort of psychological word-association game with an unseen person. When it comes to the word “ascension,” she deadpans “trap.”

And so the tone is set. Just as the woman’s image is trapped within the square confines of the TV set, hundreds of men, women and children are holed up in a starship named Ascension, 50 years into a covert 100-year mission to populate a world near the Proxima Centauri.

Ascension, the show, is a six-part miniseries inspired by the real-life Project Orion that existed under U.S. president John F. Kennedy as the Cold War threatened to boil over. A joint production with American cable network Syfy, Ascension aired in the U.S. last December to a solid 1.8 million viewers — enough to justify thinking about expanding it to a full-blown series.

It stars Brian Van Holt (Cougar Town) as the ship’s captain, Alberta-born Tricia Helfer (Battlestar Galactica) as his wife and other Canadian actors including Andrea Roth, Wendy Crewson and John Ralston. With its modern-day passengers still milling around in 1960s garb and watching shows like Gidget, Ascension has the champagne-clinking charm of a period drama and the tension of a murder mystery.

Brandon Paul stars as first officer Aaron Gault in the new CBC miniseries Ascension. [CBC]

Indeed, the first episode signals trouble within the time capsule. A woman going for a late-night swim is found dead and it’s deemed a suicide, but there are signs it could be the first murder aboard the ship. The stakes are high: if her death is a homicide, chaos and fear could rock the spacecraft.

Lest things get too claustrophobic, the series lets some air into its atmosphere with a subplot back on Earth. The man who secretly founded the Ascension mission is in a long-term care facility, too ill to speak and visited by his son, Harris Enzmann (Gil Bellows). When a student comes along telling Harris of his father’s concealed history, Harris is initially dismissive. But there’s always the question, what if?

“Depending on your point of view, he can either be the hero or the villain of the story. And your point of view of that could change scene by scene,” says Bellows, who only learned of the real-life Project Orion after he became involved with the TV project.

“My point of view about pretty much everything that has occurred in history is that it doesn’t surprise me because life is always has a way of being more fascinating and more trippy than fiction.”

Visually, Ascension is a treat — a slick ’60s vibe with modern-day cinematography — and the trade-offs between the spaceship action and earthly action builds slowly and surely. But the most thought-provoking part is that what-if question.

What if the real-life Project Orion succeeded in settling a new world? Would humanity be more humane if we had a reset button? Or is evil inevitable?

In one telling scene, the enduring questions of fate and self-determination creep in. The first officer alludes to what’s called The Crisis — the coming-of-age moment when young adults realize they have no control over their lives, and that life aboard the ship was chosen for them before they were born. There’s also an underlying Downton Abbey-type tension between classes, those who live on the upper deck and those on the lower deck. And shots of men slapping women on their rears, Mad Men style, bring to mind feminist issues in news thanks to Bill Cosby, Jian Ghomeshi and the NFL.

“Between the concepts of technology, global relations, our relationship with space travel, reality television and everything else, there are a lot of parallels and ways you can connect with the show that are timely and poignant for sure,” says Bellows.

It’s heady stuff to contemplate, even with Elton John’s Rocket Man playing in the background.

Ascension debuts Monday, Feb. 9, CBC

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/ascension-a-60s-inspired-murder-mystery-in-space/feed0Ascension - Season 1mhank2012Ascension - Season 1AscensionBitten’s new season full of witches, revenge and horrorhttp://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/bittens-new-season-full-of-witches-revenge-and-horror
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/bittens-new-season-full-of-witches-revenge-and-horror#commentsThu, 05 Feb 2015 20:59:22 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=588856]]>Once Bitten, never shy. As played by Laura Vandervoort, female werewolf Elena Michaels is the fierce lead character in homegrown sci-fi series Bitten, returning for its second season this Saturday on Space.

Loosely based on author Kelley Armstrong’s Women of the Otherworld series, Bitten wrapped up its first season with an epic battle between Elena’s wolf pack and the mutts commissioned by insurgent Daniel Santos (Michael Luckett) and Malcolm Danvers (James McGowan).

As the fur settled, Elena discovered the head of her human boyfriend Philip (Paul Greene) placed, Godfather-style, in a bed. And in Season 2, she’s bent on revenge. Series creator and executive producer Daegan Fryklind offered five tidbits about the upcoming season.

1. Something witchy this way comes. As in the second book of Armstrong’s series, witches figure prominently in Season 2 of Bitten. But don’t expect the typical warts, wrinkles and wizardry: “We tried to keep our witches within our universe, so there’s not a lot of throwing fireballs or anything like that. They’re really cool, lo-fi witches,” says Fryklind.

“We have these new characters, Ruth and Paige Winterbourne (Tammy Isbell and Tommie-Amber Pirie) and Savannah Levine (Kiara Glasco). The weight of the second season is balanced between our pack story and our witch story, and how those two stories dovetail into each other.”

Steve Lund and Laura Vandervoort star in Bitten [Space/Bell]

2. Reunited, and it feels so good. Just because a character has died on Bitten, it doesn’t mean that they’re gone for good. “We always can play with flashbacks — it’s one of the beauties of this show,” teases Fryklind.

“There are a few guest stars that are surprises in the first episode and some others that are surprises throughout the rest of the season. I don’t want to give any spoilers away, but I think fans will be happy with who’s coming back this season.”

3. The horror, the horror. “We wanted to go for more of a horror tone in the second season compared to what we had in the first season,” says Fryklind. “We play with an anthology format like American Horror Story, where we’re serialized through the season.”

What’s more, this season is comprised of 10 episodes instead of last year’s 13, making for an intense ride: “The pace of Season 2 is a lot faster and the storytelling is more robust. We hit the gas out of the gate and don’t step off the pedal.”

4. A dish best served cold. “Right in the first episode, we wanted to have a character who was out for revenge. This is a very different Elena from Season 1. She’s just laser-focused on finding Malcolm Danvers and exacting revenge for the death of Philip,” she says.

“But she’s also a very feminine character, and we get to see a side of her that we hadn’t seen in Season 1, that maternal side of Elena Michaels when we’re exploring her relationship with Savannah Levine.”

5. Seeing is believing. Fryklind says Bitten ramps up its visual effects this season, courtesy of Vancouver-based company Atmosphere: “The wolves are terrific in Season 1, and they’re amazing in Season 2. The teeth, the saliva — everything about them is phenomenal.”

But even with the high-tech tricks, there are some times you need an actual canine instead of a computer.

“Our line producer, Norman Denver, has a lovely German shepherd named Chewie, who’s our wolf stand in. Chewie comes to set whenever we have the wolf stuff, so the actors have a sense of where the wolf’s going to be in the scene, especially if they’re interacting,” Fryklind says. “We also have a giant stuffed wolf that we can bring in.”

Bitten’s Season 2 debuts Saturday, Feb. 7, on Space

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/bittens-new-season-full-of-witches-revenge-and-horror/feed0Laura Vandervoortmhank2012BittenBittenHouse of Cards debuts Season 3 motion posterhttp://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/house-of-cards-debuts-season-3-motion-key-art-canadian-exclusive
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/house-of-cards-debuts-season-3-motion-key-art-canadian-exclusive#commentsThu, 05 Feb 2015 14:18:29 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=589245]]>As the flagship Netflix series, House of Cards has never been afraid to innovate. And the upcoming third season is certainly no exception.

On Thursday, streaming service released the key art for the series (that’s it below, in a Canadian exclusive) which not only features the standard flat image of (spoiler alert) 46th President of the United States Frank Underwood and the first lady disembarking from Air Force One, but for the first time ever it also comes to life via motion art.

Check it out below:

House of Cards Season 3 [Netflix]

House of Cards Season 3 debuts in its entirety February 27 on Netflix Canada

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/house-of-cards-debuts-season-3-motion-key-art-canadian-exclusive/feed0HOC_S3_Keyart_TARMAC_US-MAINthecanadadotcomHouse of Cards Season 3Quebec actor Michael Mando plays Better Call Saul villianhttp://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/quebec-actor-michael-mando-plays-better-call-saul-villian
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/quebec-actor-michael-mando-plays-better-call-saul-villian#commentsWed, 04 Feb 2015 21:24:56 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=588726]]>Michael Mando was born in Quebec City and by his own estimation lived in 10 cities on four continents by the time he was 20. He learned to speak English and Spanish fluently, even though French was his mother tongue, and estimates he lived in more than 30 homes before turning 25.

Even so, despite an early career as a writer, actor and director career in classical and contemporary theatre, with the occasional appearance in Canadian film and TV shows like Orphan Black, he could not have anticipated being cast one day as the central villain in Better Call Saul, a prequel to Breaking Bad, one of the small screen’s most respected and recognized dramas of the past 20 years.

Mando’s character, a would-be crime kingpin named Nacho Varga, doesn’t appear until Better Call Saul’s third episode, on Feb. 16, but his character will cast a shadow over the entire season from then on.

Varga is an unapologetic crime artist given to saying things like given to saying things like, “I like ripping off thieves ‘cause they don’t go to the cops; they got no recourse.”

In person, Mando is more relaxed, less intense and laughs easily. On the one hand, playing Nacho Varga is just another paying gig. On the other, Mando knows this could be the proverbial elusive break every promising actor dreams of.

“I got into acting really by accident,” Mando said. “My first two loves as a younger guy were poetry and sports.”

Michael Mando as Nacho in Better Call Saul

Mando studied international relations at the University of Montreal, and took a course in psychology on the side.

“I couldn’t decide what I wanted to do with my life,” he said.

He joined the theatre program at Dawson College on a lark, and learned he had a hidden talent for acting.

“In a strange way I was encouraged by my teachers right off the bat. They made me feel I needed to stick with it. It became a real love of mine and about four years ago I decided to make it my vocation. I realized I had been studying things that maybe weren’t the right thing for me. Acting felt different. I came late to it, but when I discovered it, I just knew.”

Nacho Varga — terrific name, that, Mando said with a laugh — is a wannabe crime kingpin “who has the ear of his terrifying boss.”

If that sounds a bit like Breaking Bad, it’s no accident: Breaking Bad and prequel Better Call Saul share the same writer-creators, Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould.

Mando has read a lot of scripts in his time, but Gilligan and Gould’s voice is unique, he says.

‘I couldn’t decide what I wanted to do with my life’

The dialogue practically flies off the page. It’s easy to look smart, as an actor, when the words are smart.

“What’s interesting about their approach is they don’t actually sit with the actor and go on at length about who your character is. I had one phone call. That’s it. They told me they cast me because they really liked what I brought into the audition, and then they left me alone. They wanted to see what I would bring to the character. That’s unusual. You get this incredible excitement when you’re left to your own devices and do your own research.

“I went all the way to the Mayan and Aztec cultures. I learned so many beautiful things about that world, that region. Once you have all that information, as an actor you learn instinctively what feels right for your character as you go along. It’s like real life: You don’t know from one script to the next what’s going to happen with your character. So you find yourself being tested against fate, as an actor. And that’s a beautiful place to be.”

Mando says Varga and his Orphan Black character, Vic Schmidt, a part-time drug dealer and the abusive ex-boyfriend of Tatiana Maslany’s Sarah Manning, share some traits in common, but only on a superficial level.

“Vic is the kind of person who constantly calls Nacho’s phone and Nacho doesn’t answer,” Mando said, deadpan. “That’s how bad-ass Nacho is compared to Vic. Nacho is like a young crocodile who wants to feed because he wants to grow and be king of the pond.”

Bob Odenkirk, the standup comedian, author — he counts A Load of Hooey and Hollywood Said No! among his literary oeuvre — and co-star of the 1990s’ HBO sketch-comedy program Mr. Show, is reprising the part of Saul Goodman, the ethically challenged personal attorney Odenkirk played for four seasons in Breaking Bad.

Better Call Saul is a prequel, though, and one of the first things viewers learn is that Saul Goodman is not Saul’s real name.

His real name is James “Jimmy” McGill, Esq., and Better Call Saul — set six years before Saul took on pharmaceutical entrepreneurs Walter White and Jesse Pinkman as clients — shows how McGill, facing a litany of complaints and threats of disbarment, reinvented himself as Saul Goodman, a storefront lawyer in Albuquerque, New Mexico known for his anything-goes attitude toward the law and his ubiquitous late-night TV ads, with their made-on-the-fly production values and irrepressible slogan: “Better call Saul!”

Bob Odenkirk as Saul Goodman in Better Call Saul

One other thing viewers learn early on is that McGill, of Irish-American roots — he deliberately chose a Jewish name for his newly invented self — because he believes a Jewish name will attract more paying clients.

That tells you everything you need to know about Saul Goodman, but it also tells you a lot about the series itself. Better Call Saul is a legal crime drama, shot through with dark humour and a wry, sardonic view of ethics and morality. In tone, voice and style, it echoes Breaking Bad — the two share the same writer-producers, Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, and the same setting, the sun-washed skies of the U.S. desert southwest — but similarities end there. Better Call Saul is very much its own show, Odenkirk told reporters at last month’s winter meeting of the TV Critics Association in Los Angeles.

“Every time I come into the office in this show, I say, ‘Has Walter White called yet?’” Odenkirk said.

Kidding.

“There’s a crazy ton of overlap between the two shows,” Odenkirk explained, “because Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould are the brains behind it, and the brains behind Breaking Bad, so tonally and story-wise, that gets carried over here. It’s an entirely different show, though, with its own rhythm, its own look.”

For one thing, Jesse Pinkman, Aaron Paul’s character in Breaking Bad, would still be in middle school in 2002, the year Better Call Saul begins.

“Saul Goodman is not who he is,” Odenkirk continued. “That’s a creation of his, as he told Walter White the first time he met him: ‘It’s not my name, and this whole thing is a put-on.’ So in this show you are meeting who he is, behind the mask.

“I had to rethink him. He’s a different guy here. The guy you’re going to meet in this show is far more multidimensional as a character than he was in Breaking Bad. He’s a richer character by necessity, because he’s on screen more and the story’s about him. I had to figure out these new sides of the character, and that took a little time.”

Of all the memorable characters in Breaking Bad, Ehrmantraut stood out, in part because of his acid, acerbic outlook on life and in part because of his cutting, off-the-cuff ripostes like, “Just because you shot Jesse James don’t make you Jesse James,” “How ‘bout we lose the sunglasses — I feel like I’m talking to Jackie Onassis,” and, most famously, “Keys, scumbag. It’s the universal symbol for keys.”

“I’m still discovering Mike,” Banks admitted. “I try to be true to Mike and not do him an injustice, and when I perform him, I try to remember I am Mike. I ain’t that bright, though.”

Jonathan Banks as Mike Ehrmantraut in Better Call Saul

Banks said the ghosts of Breaking Bad hovered over the Better Call Saul set during those first few days of production last summer, when the temperatures in New Mexico approached 40 degrees Celsius (104 F).

“In all seriousness, all those people — whether it was Bryan or Aaron or Betsy Brandt or Anna Gunn or Dean Norris or Giancarlo Esposito or R.J. Mitte — they are loved. Their ghosts were there, in those first few days. No question. I kept thinking I was missing people.

“By the time we got into the show, though, by episode six or seven, I realized there was a different rhythm, a different feel. I realized we were into something new, and it was really good.”

Odenkirk said one overriding challenge will face his character throughout the season.

“Saul could be disbarred at any moment,” he said. “That’s the threat.”

Better Call Saul premieres Feb. 8, AMC

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/better-call-saul-reunites-frenemies-saul-goodman-mike-ehrmantraut/feed0Better Call SaulalxstrachanBetter Call Saul/AMCBetter Call Saul/AMCBetter Call Saul/AMCReview: Better Call Saul a bright, near-brilliant spin on Breaking Badhttp://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/better-call-saul-a-bright-near-brilliant-spin-on-breaking-bad
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/better-call-saul-a-bright-near-brilliant-spin-on-breaking-bad#commentsWed, 04 Feb 2015 20:37:48 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=588675]]>When James (Jimmy) McGill, the hardscrabble public defender who will later reinvent himself as Saul Goodman, lawyer to the rich-and-infamous, feels himself getting in touch with his inner Atticus Finch, he knows it’s time to look himself in the mirror, reach for the nearby bottle of Dewar’s Blue Label and give himself a reality check. Atticus Finch? Who’s he kidding?

As played with a rakish charm by Bob Odenkirk, a veteran character actor who makes it look deceptively easy, McGill is a rogue and a louse, a born schemer with an almost infinite capacity for getting himself into jams. That he’s able to get himself out of those jams — by hook or by crook, and usually by the skin of his teeth — only adds to his charm.

Better Call Saul arrives with high expectations. It’s been billed as a prequel to Breaking Bad, and it shares much of that Emmy–winning series’ acid wit and sardonic world view.

Comparisons are a little unfair, though. Breaking Bad interwove several stories, each with its own cast of carefully drawn characters, and brought them together seamlessly at the end. Better Call Saul focuses on one story and, in early episodes anyway, one major character.

Bob Odenkirk as Saul Goodman in Better Call Saul

McGill, tired of $700 paydays for defending teenage lunkheads a man given to saying things like, “Money is not beside the point; money is the point,” is looking for that one big scam that will pave his way to a better future.

In doing so, he forgets the number one rule of being a good scam artist — never try to scam a scammer — and by the time the opening hour is over, he’s in a jam that not even he can fix.

Written by Breaking Bad’s Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, with the opener directed by Gilligan — the second episode, which will air Feb. 9, was directed by Canadian Michelle MacLaren — Better Call Saul is a smart, savvy black comedy that crackles with intelligence.

It walks a fine line. It asks the audience to sympathize with a born loser who’s his own worst enemy, and yet Gilligan and Gould have managed to pull it off. It’s a neat trick, and breathtaking to watch at times. Part of it is down to the brisk, snappy repartee between desperate characters — there are echoes of Breaking Bad in every tart, acid remark — and part of it is down to its subtle, understated message that decent moral values will win out in the end, even if it doesn’t seem so at the time.

Bob Odenkirk as Saul Goodman in Better Call Saul

It’s also clever. When a young, married couple suspected of embezzlement tell McGill that they’re having second thoughts about hiring a lawyer, because hiring a lawyer may make them look guilty, he tells them without missing a beat: “It’s getting arrested that makes people look guilty. Even the innocent ones. And innocent people get arrested every day.”

Later, as Goodman, McGill will run late-night TV ads that proclaim, among other things, “Don’t let false allegations push you into an unfair fight. I’ll give you the defence you deserve!”

Better Call Saul is that rare TV spinoff that lives up to the advance hype. It signals its intentions right from the start, with an opening montage, filmed in black-and-white, to the strains of Address Unknown by the Ink Spots, with its lyric, “From the place of your birth to ends of the earth/I’ve searched only to find, only to find Address Unknown.”

In a TV season short on auspicious debuts, Better Call Saul shows early signs of being a winner. Even if it is about a loser.

Better Call Saul debuts Feb. 8, AMC

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/better-call-saul-a-bright-near-brilliant-spin-on-breaking-bad/feed0Better Call SaulalxstrachanBetter Call Saul/AMCBetter Call Saul/AMCEarth: A New Wild explores our connection with naturehttp://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/earth-a-new-wild-explores-our-connection-with-nature
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/earth-a-new-wild-explores-our-connection-with-nature#commentsTue, 03 Feb 2015 16:11:55 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=587721]]>Just as Earth: A New Wild takes a fresh look at the way human beings are intimately connected with the planet’s last surviving wild animals, Sri Lanka-born conservationist M. Sanjayan wanted his five-part documentary series to stand out from the crowd of wildlife programs.

As executive vice-president and lead scientist with Conservation International, Sanjayan understands the need to reshape his message for changing times. As a member of the National Geographic Society’s Explorers’ Council, a panel of scientists, he acknowledges the role science can play in solving the world’s environmental problems. But a stint as the CBS News chief science correspondent and appearances for the Discovery Channel and BBC and on David Letterman’s Late Show have taught him about how a simple message can move and shape popular opinion.

Sanjayan chose to reveal nature in a new light: by putting human beings back into the picture.

Earth: A New Wild was filmed in 29 different countries over a period of several years, all with the aim of showing encounters between wild animals and the people who live with them, and in some cases work with them.

Sanjayan spends time with baby pandas

The idea, Sanjayan says, is to show — indirectly and without bullying the viewer — the often surprising ways nature affects our everyday lives and the role ordinary, everyday people can play in restoring the natural world.

The series debuts Thursday on PBS. The five parts — Home, Plains, Forests, Oceans and Water — focus on a specific habitat, “frontier places,” where humans are engaging with nature in unusual and unique ways.

The opening hour focuses on how captive-born giant pandas can be reintroduced back into the wild and follows the release of one of the first known captive-born pandas to be released back into what remains of the bamboo forests in China. The hour also looks at the pioneering work of primatologist Jane Goodall in helping rural villagers in Tanzania live in harmony with wild chimpanzees.

“We have seen ourselves as being separate from nature for probably the past century, or more,” Sanjayan says. “We see nature as being something out there, pristine, gorgeous and beautiful, like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, something to be admired. We’ve all seen Planet Earth, the amazing documentary that BBC and Discovery did. If you were an alien from outer space, and your only conception of planet Earth was what you saw in that program, you’d think this was an amazing planet. You’d climb in your spaceship and come here, and you’d be in for a big surprise. Because everywhere you look, you’ll see people — you’ll see us.

Sanjayan and a panda walk on a log

“I wanted to do one simple thing with A New Wild. I wanted to turn the camera around, because I don’t think you can tell the story of the planet without also telling the human story.”

The human element is what makes Earth: A New Wild different, Sanjayan says.

“The best stories, frankly, were with the people,” he says. “It was humbling to see and meet the people I did and hear their stories firsthand.”

Sanjayan believes the most memorable nature programs must feature an element of surprise.

“I know this is hard to believe, but I’ve done a lot of these documentaries and you know what you’re going to see, for the most part. You know the payoff,” he says.

Sanjayan walks in the sea

“I wanted to approach this a little differently. There are surprises along the way. I promise you, in every story — and there are four or five key stories in each episode — I was surprised, shocked even by what I learned.

“This show is unusual in that’s it’s a nature show with an opinion,” Sanjayan says. “Part of that opinion is based on my journey, my own experience.

“If I start with the premise that the Earth is screwed, that there’s no hope at all, I might as well just stop now. I can go to Vegas and have a good time. So, with this show, I’m on a journey of discovery, a quest to find signs of hope.

“And I found a cool thing,” Sanjayan says. “It’s not just about people giving nature a little helping hand. It’s the realization that people today are inextricably linked to nature. We realize that saving nature is really about saving ourselves.”

Earth: A New Wild premières Feb. 4, PBS

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/earth-a-new-wild-explores-our-connection-with-nature/feed0Earth: A New WildalxstrachanEarth: A New Wild/Ami VitaleAmi VitaleEarth: A New Wild/Joe LoncraineThe Affair, Masters of Sex showrunners gutsy when it comes to sex (with video)http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/the-affair-masters-of-sex-showrunners-gutsy-when-it-comes-to-sex-with-video
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/the-affair-masters-of-sex-showrunners-gutsy-when-it-comes-to-sex-with-video#commentsMon, 02 Feb 2015 15:52:52 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=586477]]>PASADENA, Calif. — At least one woman in the room called Showtime Networks’ all-woman panel, Sexuality and Television: A Female Perspective, an “afternoon delight.” The blog site Jezebel.com, which reaches readers under the tagline, “Celebrity, Sex, Fashion for Women. Without Airbrushing,” called the panel, part of a recent session of the Television Critics Association meeting in Pasadena, California, “incredible,” with one “truth bomb” delivered after another.

The Huffington Post took a more sedate view, noting that the all-woman panel talked frankly about sex scenes, at the same time shedding light on the “problem with strong female characters.”

The music-and-entertainment digital magazine, Paste, noted that sex is a part of life, commenting, “in a perfect world, we wouldn’t need a panel like this. There’d be no exploitation to discuss, no misogynistic interpretations of female characters’ actions, no women relegated to window dressing.”

Paste added, the panel was both an eye-opener and a much-needed tonic for a conversation that often seems tired and jaded.

Showtime, the CBS-owned pay-TV rival to HBO, produces the adult-themed dramas Masters of Sex, Shameless, and this year’s Golden Globe winner for outstanding drama series The Affair, all of which feature complex women navigating complicated issues.

The period drama, Masters of Sex depicts female scientific pioneers struggling with gender roles in mid-20th-century America. Shameless is a contemporary drama about millennials looking for love in suburban Chicago, and The Affair is about two women struggling to deal with the fallout from an extramarital affair.

Maura Tierney as Helen, left, and Dominic West as Noah in The Affair

All three series were represented on the panel by female writer-producers and female actors — Affair creator and head-writer Sarah Treem and lead actress Maura Tierney; Shameless executive producer Nancy Pimental and actresses Emmy Rossum and Shanola Hampton; and Masters of Sex executive-producer and head writer Michelle Ashford and actress Caitlin FitzGerald.

For the traditional broadcast networks, sex often remains the subject that must not be named. For the specialty cable channels, though — outlets like HBO, Showtime, FX and AMC that define adult drama, be it Masters of Sex or The Affair — sex is depicted as a part of everyday life, a rite of passage to be treated seriously and with consideration, not something to be exploited for prurient gain and a ratings boost.

“Sexuality is a part of life, I hope, and it’s interesting that the women behind these shows get to write these characters, and we get to show them,” Rossum said. “We get to explore their intimate side, be it anger or loss or happiness or sexuality.

“Sometimes you have sex for a reason that has nothing to do with sex. Maybe it’s about power. Maybe it’s about insecurity. Maybe it’s about just wanting to connect. Maybe it’s just about wanting to feel good in the moment. What I like about shows like The Affair or Shameless is that we don’t show it in a gratuitous way. It’s illuminating something deeper in a character. The context may be sexual, but it has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with emotion.”

Michael Sheen stars as William Masters, left, and Caitlin FitzGerald appears as Libby Masters in Masters of Sex

Ashford acknowledged that it would be difficult to create a drama called Masters of Sex, about sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson, and then not deal with sex.

“One of the things that appealed to me was that our characters came at sex initially through their work, which was science. I thought that was an interesting way to look at sex. It’s fresh and different. It allowed us to look at sex in almost the polar opposite way to the way it’s usually done, which is: How do you make sex look sexy? Our job was to make it look as unsexy as humanly possible, because, to us, it’s about science. As for our characters, we thought, let’s expand on that idea, but let’s make sure we’re never showing sex to be sexy. We’re entrusted with telling dramatic stories, so sex becomes a sign of something deeper in the relationship, some emotional stage”

For Treem, the sex in The Affair is about communication.

“It’s a different way to show the characters communicating,” Treem explained. “We hope our sex scenes move our stories ahead emotionally, as specifically as if we had used words. Sometimes people talk to each other more clearly in sex than they can in conversation. Whenever we do a sex scene we think first about what the characters are trying to say to each other and then asking ourselves, ‘How are we going to do it through sex?’”

Ruth Wilson as Alison, left, and Dominic West as Noah in The Affair

Rossum cut to the chase. “With these female showrunners, there’s no lack of balls to write a female character who’s complex and gutsy,” she said. “We’re so lucky not to be confined to just showing the culturally acceptable parts of these characters. We get to show everything about them. Our female writers write raunchier stuff than our male writers, and I don’t think our female directors are any less apt to push the envelope.”

“There are many, many layers to doing sex scenes,” Ashford added. “On Masters of Sex, we actually do them in a way the movies do when they have a big action scene with a lot of dangerous stunts, and they have a safety meeting first. We have a big sex meeting before our sex scenes because we realize that, in an odd way, there’s a similar kind of danger to people standing around on the set. People need to be prepared. It’s a very complicated process when you’re doing this material.

“We write characters. We pay the same attention to our male characters as we do our female characters. What you can’t escape, though, is that, as a woman, you have this prism through which you’re filtering all your life experience, and that comes out on the page.”

The Season 2 premiere of MasterChef Canada will replace homegrown comedy Spun Out in the plum post-Super Bowl time slot, says a CTV rep.

After Spun Out actor Jean-Paul (J.P.) Manoux was charged with voyeurism, the network announced it would postpone all broadcasts of the one-year-old comedy indefinitely — including the episode scheduled to air after the football-fuelled event on Sunday.

MasterChef Canada was originally slated to return Feb. 8. Spun Out, in which Manoux played executive assistant Bryce, was scheduled to be back in earnest March 5.

Nevertheless, the show — whether it be cooking or comedy — must go on. All those viewers hopped up on a Patriots/Seahawks victory need something to watch post-game, and CTV is hoping the football and foodie crowds overlap.

As in all MasterChef formats, Canada’s version features home cooks without any professional experience. Challenges include mystery boxes, pressure tests and off-site team competitions. The winner will take home the $100,000 grand prize.

The judges from Season 1 will return to taste, scowl and praise each dish. They are Oliver & Bonacini co-founder Michael Bonacini, self-proclaimed “Demon Chef” Alvin Leung and Orderfire Restaurant Group owner Claudio Aprile.

Claudio Aprile, from left, Michael Bonacini and Alvin Leung will return as judges for MasterChef Canada’s second season [CTV/Bell]

“This season the challenges are more fun, more interesting and different,” says Leung. “I can’t tell you any of them, but we have some fantastic off-sites this year, going to really great places.”

He also says the friendly rivalry between the judges will be a little less friendly, if not downright competitive.

“I had the whole year to learn about my two esteemed partners’ shortcomings. So now I’m able to manipulate things and get my way,” Leung says with a laugh. “My approach is still the same — I’m tough. The way Michael and Claudio approach it is how they would do it.”

This season, Graham Elliot of the U.S. MasterChef will appear as a guest judge. The bubbly and bespectacled chef was eager to sample Canadian ingredients when he trekked north for filming.

“My favourite ingredient happens to be ubiquitous up here: maple syrup. I think it’s similar to wine in that it speaks of the terroir and the seasons. You taste it and you know where you are,” he says.

“What’s great is you have things from Montreal, which is one of the coolest food towns in the continent. And then you have Vancouver and Toronto, which are major metropolitan areas — some with a lot of Asian influences. That’s what’s really exciting: to see all that come to fruition on the plate and see what’s going on here. And hang out with these other judges, who are badasses.”

The franchise boasts more than 50 adaptations worldwide. The American kiddie version of MasterChef, MasterChef Junior, is currently airing Tuesdays on CTV Two and Fox. The U.S. version of MasterChef will return this summer for a sixth season on CTV and Fox.

MasterChef Canada moves to its regular time slot of Sundays at 7 p.m. ET/PT on CTV beginning Feb. 8.

When Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Science Guy host Bill Nye held a roundtable discussion on the nature of genius, though, it seemed for a moment there as if time had stopped.

“Genius” and “television” are rarely mentioned in the same breath but there it was: Wozniak, Stone and Nye appeared at the winter meeting of the Television Critics Association to promote the upcoming National Geographic documentary series American Genius, about the nature of genius and how some of the world’s greatest inventions were the result of personal rivalries, from Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates to George Westinghouse vs. Thomas Edison, and so on. (No Canadian network has announced that it will air it yet.)

One by one, Wozniak, Nye and Stone tackled the grand themes of science and religion, nature vs. nurture, the line where human frailty and creative inspiration intersect and life’s great unanswerables — challenged head-on in a freewheeling conversation that, with no moderator present, threatened to spiral out of control at times.

The result, like a rare and fine TV program, was both entertaining and enlightening.

Some highlights:

Apple’s Steve Wozniak on book learning vs. learning how to think:

“In school, they say you can either memorize facts or be taught how to think. How to think is thinking outside the box — coming up with ideas that aren’t in the book, doing something in a new way that is more efficient, that does something you never imagined being possible before.”

Bill Nye

Twitter’s Biz Stone on how genius doesn’t just happen in a vacuum (in more than 140 characters):

“There’s this myth, especially in Silicon Valley, that there’s a founder of something, that this person came up an idea completely out of the clear blue sky and built it himself, on his own, and then one day hundreds of millions of people were using it. That’s just absolutely not true. How it works is you come up with some wacky idea — in my case, we were doing something as a side project for fun — and it’s not until you bring in other entrepreneurial minds willing to take a chance on you that you build a team that encourages something to grow and become something special. No one person can claim credit for the success of something like Twitter. It’s a huge team effort. And a lot of it has to do with luck. A lot of it is right-place, right-time stuff.”

‘Science Guy’ Bill Nye on innovation vs. invention:

“Innovation is about creating new things. The United States — are there people in Canada, too? — North American societies, glorious and free, what keeps us in the game is our ability to innovate, to come up with new ideas. We don’t manufacture things the way we once did. So we need to encourage creativity. In order to do that, though, we need to have a fundamental understanding and respect for science. If we were to invest in public education, public universities, we would make ourselves more competitive. You can’t do it in four years. It takes 20 or 25 years. It’s easy for me to say that, I know, but my hope is that we can encourage people to celebrate genius, to appreciate the competition that nurtures and causes new inventions, so that people in the United States and Canada will invest in public education for the betterment of humankind.”

Stone on science vs. creativity:

“I don’t think of myself as a genius. I think of myself as a creative type. I started out as an artist. It wasn’t like I was trying to say. ‘Okay, how about we invent something that will topple this regime.’ No way. In hindsight, yes, I could say, ‘Yes, that’s what we were trying to do from the beginning.’ No way. We were just doing something that was goofy and fun. We thought, wouldn’t it be neat if we could figure out what our friends were up to without even asking them. Ha-ha, that would be fun. And then it just went crazy. People called us geniuses, but we never were.”

Wozniak on show vs. tell:

“There are many types of geniuses. Some geniuses are good at the words they use and being heard. They’re loved by people for that reason. Some geniuses are good at amassing power and using power to take credit for things. My genius is one that a lot of people think goes to the heart of the matter, learning things and memorizing things and being able to come up with something tangible. There are inventors and there are engineers.”

Steve Wozniak [Getty Images]

Stone on recycling vs. repurposing:

“A key point of innovation is repurposing stuff that was made for other uses. A cool part of innovation is taking something and building something new from there.”

Wozniak on how computers can only do so much — for now:

“I thought computers were going to improve education in school, but what I found out is they don’t make us smart. They don’t make us think better the way I thought they would. What’s in the future — I can’t say. As we get closer to consciousness in computers, though, they might one day become like a human guide.”

Stone on how the times dictate innovation and invention:

“YouTube could not have been invented in 1990 because the Internet wasn’t fast enough and there weren’t enough cameras and mobile phones. At certain stages things come together so that things can be invented, and then someone takes the credit. We can invent a lot more now.”

Wozniak on being an engineer vs. being an inventor:

“I was an engineer. You learn all the techniques required to make a product. If you’re an inventor, you’re the type that gets a weird idea; you think to yourself, what might be possible based on my experience of making things? The inventor likes to go into the lab, twiddle some things, come up with a proof-of-concept, show people, ‘This can actually be done. Look at this.’ I think that that’s an important part of genius.”

Stone on overnight success:

“I always like to say it takes 10 years, a lot of hard work and a lot of luck, to become an overnight success.”

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/bill-nye-steve-wozniak-talk-american-genius-with-video/feed0Bill NyealxstrachanBill Nye/National Geographic ChannelSteve WozniakGumby turns 60: Creator’s son reflects on green guy’s legacyhttp://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/gumby-turns-60-creators-son-reflects-on-green-guys-legacy
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/gumby-turns-60-creators-son-reflects-on-green-guys-legacy#commentsWed, 28 Jan 2015 19:46:13 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=585167]]>Eyebrows knitted and lips pursed, a four-year-old girl examines the plastic Gumby figurine in her hands. It’s not any Frozen character she knows, or a shy new colt from My Little Pony. It’s not even Dora the Explorer’s little-known cousin.

“What is it, Mommy?” she asks.

“Gumby,” the mother answers, and plays a DVD of old episodes to generate some context.

The girl is transfixed. Later, she proudly thrusts the figurine in the faces of her 59-year-old grandma and 29-year-old uncle, both of whom get a spark of nostalgia in their eyes.

The clay creation, it seems, can charm just about any generation. It’s been 60 years since Art Clokey designed the character that anchored 233 television episodes in the 1950s, 1960s and 1980s.

Teletoon Retro is celebrating with a three-hour Gumby marathon on Thursday, and it airs newly re-mastered episodes on Sunday nights.

“There’s a heart to it,” says Joe Clokey, Art’s son. He now runs the Gumby empire with his wife, Joan, as the president of Premavision Animation Studios.

“The clay animation is very appealing, especially with the bright primary colours. And I think the textural feel of stop-motion animation appeals to kids, plus the action and adventure and imagination. That, combined with the characters, is why it keeps lasting.”

Gumby [Teletoon Retro]

Gumby was born Jan. 29, 1955, the same day as Joe’s sister Ann. (Joe refers to both as older siblings.)

Art was a film student at the University of Southern California and, with his wife Ruth, had met with Sam Engel, a producer at 20th Century Fox.

Engel had seen Art’s animated short Gumbasia, a piece that used camera movement and stop-motion editing to make clay shapes move to jazz music.

“My dad had visions of directing Sophia Loren, but in the next sentence (Engel) said, ‘Art, I want to improve the quality of children’s television. Can you make characters out of this clay to entertain children?’”

Art agreed, they returned home and Ruth fashioned the shape of Gumby.

“It was like a gingerbread boy, but with the bump,” says Joe. “And it’s green because my dad loved green and liked the process of chlorophyll, which turns light into energy and life.”

The name Gumby came from the term “gumbo,” named for the clay-and-mud goop that Art played in during summers at his grandfather’s farm. The slope of Gumby’s head resembled the large cowlick that Art’s father couldn’t seem to tame.

Finally, at seven inches long with wide eyes and a healthy green complexion, Gumby entered the world.

Engel agreed to finance a pilot film, and Thomas Warren Sarnoff at NBC offered Art a seven-year contract to produce Gumby stories for television. Moon Trip debuted during The Howdy Doody Show in 1956, and Gumby headlined his own series the next year.

“My mom and dad were a team,” says Joe. “She was the producer who hired people and worked with business deals, and my dad was the quiet guy behind the scenes, doing the creative art.”

After a short hiatus, a second run of Gumby episodes aired from 1962 to 1968. Several actors have voiced the lead, but Dallas McKennon is most known for the job. He also voiced Gumby’s sidekick, the burnt-sienna pony Pokey.

Gumby and Tara are flanked by multiple Pokey figures in Gumby: The Movie. [Teletoon Retro]

“I remember growing up during the second Gumby series. I remember going to the studio and loving it. I loved the wood shop where they built the sets and the smell of fresh-cut wood. I remember the shelves full of toys. … I remember thinking, ‘Oh there’s where all my toys went!’

“I remember the smell of film; I remember the smell of clay. And then I’d walk through these big doors and there’d be 10 animation setups with all these dollies and cameras and these tabletops that had miniature sets. And as a kid, I was just in awe of that.”

In 1968, Gumby ended and it wasn’t until the mid-1980s that Gumby came back into public favour. Networks aired repeats of the series, college kids got a kick out of the surreal feel and Eddie Murphy played a surly, cigar-chomping version of the character on Saturday Night Live.

“The Eddie Murphy thing was hilarious,” says Joe. “It was funny because he was the opposite of what Gumby was. … There’ve been lots of things like that, and my dad thought those were hilarious. As long as they were on late at night, you know?”

Lorimar-Telepictures glommed onto the Gumby revival with 99 new adventures airing in syndication. There were era-specific updates — Gumby had a rock band! He used computers! — as well as new characters like little sister Minga and a mastodon named Denali.

Gumby, left, and Pokey [Teletoon Retro]

In 1995, well into the era of grunge, angst and flannel, Gumby: The Movie hit theatres to middling reviews.

A decade later, Game Boy Advance released the first Gumby video game, Gumby vs. the Astrobots, and in 2006 the Emmy-winning documentary Gumby Dharma debuted.

In his sunset years, Art started grooming Joe to take over the family business. The younger Clokey had a degree in horticulture and, with Art’s mentorship, had produced 60 plant-based films over 20 years.

“My biggest project to date, outside of producing new productions, was re-mastering the ’50s and ’60s episodes, which are the cream of the crop,” Joe says. “They look like they were shot this year — they’re that colourful — and I put the original soundtracks back on them.”

Art Clokey died in 2010 at age 88 in his sleep. Google paid tribute with an interactive stop-motion Gumby doodle. But Art still shines through in every Gumby episode.

“Gumby is optimistic, trying to help people. He’s an Everyman hero. Dad’s real personality was more like Pokey, more grounded. But my dad was mischievous like the Blockheads, too. All those characters came out of my dad’s psyche,” says Joe.

“He was a seeker. His motto in life was ‘character is power’ … What I’d like to do is embrace the charm of the ’50s episodes and I’d like to continue it in the future.”

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/gumby-turns-60-creators-son-reflects-on-green-guys-legacy/feed1Gumbymhank2012GumbyGumby: The Movie.GumbyAl Michaels on league’s woes on eve of Super Bowl XLIX (with video)http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/al-michaels-on-leagues-woes-on-eve-of-super-bowl-xlix-with-video
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/al-michaels-on-leagues-woes-on-eve-of-super-bowl-xlix-with-video#commentsWed, 28 Jan 2015 17:57:35 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=584482]]>No one ever accused Al Michaels of being deflated of hot air, and it was no different on this day.

They were there to talk football, on the eve of one of the biggest TV events of the year, and Michaels was practically bursting with pride and anticipation.

And then the questions started.

First up, the issue of Ray Rice, quickly followed by mention of Adrian Peterson. The concussion controversy. Not one to let anyone deflate a little air out of his skin, Michaels dug in and played defence.

“Well, yeah, it’s been a year that the NFL would, in many regards, love to forget,” Michaels said. “The Ray Rice thing broke in the off season, obviously. The original suspension took place in the off season, but then the tape came out after the first weekend of play. So you had that. The following week, you had Adrian Peterson.

Al Michaels, left, and Cris Collinsworth on Sunday Night Football

“I think we have a responsibility to address the issue. I don’t think you belabour it, though. If we have news, obviously, you want to be at the forefront of telling people what you know to be new and isn’t just rehashing things.

“Looking back at this year, it was a very difficult year for the NFL off the field. But when I’m asked if people will lose interest in the NFL, I say no, not at all. Look at the television ratings; look at the attendance. I think fans compartmentalize a lot of this. They know what’s going on. They know there’s a lot of stuff that needs to be cleaned up. They understand that. They read about it and they hear about it. But when you get to Super Bowl weekend, the fan basically says, ‘I want my football.’ And that gets borne out in the ratings on Sunday and Monday.”

Gaudelli added the Super Bowl broadcast team has a responsibility — to a point.

“When you’re doing the game, you have to remember people are really tuning in to watch the game,” he said. “When something like a Ray Rice or Ray McDonald or Adrian Peterson come up and it’s part of the story, you have to deal with it. You try to deal with it as succinctly as possible and back to the game, though, because while you have that responsibility to make sure people are aware of what’s going on, you don’t want to intrude too much on the game itself. It’s a tricky dance, but a dance you have to do.”

The Super Bowl is a study in excess. The pre-game show alone will be six hours, Gaudelli confirmed, and will be anchored by Bob Costas, backed by Dan Patrick, Tony Dungy, Rodney Harrison “and a cast of thousands.”

Cris Collinsworth, left, and Al Michaels on Sunday Night Football

Carrie Underwood recorded Waiting All Day as this year’s Super Bowl opening tune earlier this year.

True to football’s annus horribilis, though, even that didn’t go according to plan.

“We recorded Carrie’s vocals back in May,” Gaudelli recalled. “I had to fill in the blank with the two teams, obviously. If knew who they would be, I wouldn’t be here today. Carrie insisted, ‘Please, give me two teams. Guess. Just put two teams in there.’ So I said, ‘Why don’t you just sing the Colts and the Packers?’ That combination was alive until just this past week — which I’m sure is what Carrie was hoping. So she was back in the recording studio to record the Patriots and the Seahawks.”

Asked to pick a winner, Michaels hedged his bets at first, then leaned to the west.

“Seattle’s done a tremendous job in building their team,” he said. “The defence is great. Russell Wilson at quarterback is an amazing story. Tom Brady has been around a long, long time, and does things a certain way. Russell does things a little bit differently. First of all, he’s only about 5-foot-10. He gets out of the pocket. He’s exciting, unbelievably so. He’s a running quarterback. Brady is not. The quarterback will always be the focal point because he’s the guy that has the ball every play. He’s going to take every snap. He’s going to throw it half the time or hand it off, so he’s going to be the central figure. It is and has been and will probably continue to be a quarterback driven league. But with the Seattle Seahawks, you have a lot of other elements, too.”

Sometimes it is about the sum of the parts.

Super Bowl XLIX airs Sunday, Feb. 1, on CTV/NBC

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/al-michaels-on-leagues-woes-on-eve-of-super-bowl-xlix-with-video/feed0Super Bowl XLIXalxstrachanSunday Night Football/NBCSunday Night FootballMasterChef Junior: Gordon Ramsay is kinder, gentler with kids (with video)http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/masterchef-junior-gordon-ramsay-is-kinder-gentler-with-kids-with-video
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/masterchef-junior-gordon-ramsay-is-kinder-gentler-with-kids-with-video#commentsWed, 28 Jan 2015 17:51:31 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=585200]]>Gordon Ramsay was on his best behaviour this day. No tantrums. No glass-shattering verbal confrontations. No four letter words, certainly not those beginning with “f” unless it was to do with food. MasterChef Junior features a kinder, gentler Ramsay, in part because his fellow master chefs Graham Elliot and Christina Tosi are a moderating influence on the notoriously hot-tempered chef, and in part because the contestants in the room with Ramsay were aged eight, 10, 11 and 12.

This was the Ramsay who was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Queen Elizabeth II in the 2006 honours list, “for services to the hospitality industry,” the same Ramsay whose restaurants have earned a total of 15 Michelin stars.

Ramsay is no shrinking violet, not when it comes to TV programs such as Hell’s Kitchen, Hotel Hell and Kitchen Nightmares, but MasterChef Junior is cut from a different cloth. The idea is to encourage children to learn how to cook — Ramsay himself is a father of four — and learn a little about life along the way.

MasterChef Junior allows Ramsay to get in touch with his inner Jamie Oliver, and audiences have responded. MasterChef Junior has proven to be a surprise hit for the Fox network — it airs on CTV Two in Canada — in part because it’s about affirmation, not humiliation, and in part because it’s that rare reality-competition program that entire families can watch together without the adults in the room lunging for the mute button on the remote.

Gordon Ramsay returns to MasterChef Junior

“For me, it’s an education,” Ramsay admitted at the recently concluded winter meeting of the Television Critics Association in Los Angeles. ”It’s a win-win. The juniors have kicked butt with the senior version. They’re picking up a life skill. And I think we’ve struck a lovely balance between our eight- and 13-year-olds.”

Ramsay acknowledged that audiences may be tiring of reality- TV bicker-bashes between ill-mannered adults with bad attitudes. The children on MasterChef Junior often end up supporting and encouraging each other, without being asked.

“These kids are fearless,” Ramsay said. “When they walk into this arena, they get away from their parents and they become talented, creative individuals who want to be a little bit daring. They’re young and tenacious; they haven’t got to that awkward stage where they’re jealous of one another. We’re determined to stamp that out, if we see it happening.”

MasterChef Junior will evolve as the season progresses.

Gordon Ramsay and contestant Riley on MasterChef Junior

“We have some exciting cards up our sleeve, but I don’t want to stand on a platform and dictate,” Ramsay said. “Some of the most magical moments you see on MasterChef Junior are when we, Graham and Christina and I, roll up our sleeves and get in there and participate along with them. It’s about picking up life skills, and growing as you go along.

“I cried, literally just before Christmas, watching my 13-year-old daughter getting upset over scrambled eggs. I was disappointed actually that she didn’t use my recipe. She went off and did her own. It’s about nurturing talent, helping someone become confident in the kitchen and learn a life skill along the way.

The contestants’ ages are a critical factor in helping MasterChef Junior become the showcase Ramsay wants it to be.

“Eight to 13 is an incredibly sensitive age, because you’re learning about life while trying to grow up at a fast pace. I think cooking helps to slow them down and appreciate that moment in time.

MasterChef Junior

“Whether they follow it as a career path or choose not to, they’ve picked up a life skill. Personally, I’m fed up with the guilt that’s put on their shoulders about obesity, bad eating habits and things like that. That’s often the parents; it’s not them. Being a parent myself, I understand the importance of finding the right balance.”

Cooking may not be taught in schools the way science and math are, but Ramsay believes it should be.

“English and math are pivotal, but cooking is equally as important. Because three times a day, seven days a week, for the rest of your life, you have to eat. And these children pick up an incredible level of confidence along the way. They go back to school knowing full well that they may not be the best at French and they may not be the best at history but, my God, they can cook better than every (cafeteria cook) who’s about to put food out for the next two hours.”

Overnight ratings for some of TV’s most-watched programs have slid overall over the past two years, according to numbers from Nielsen Media Research in the U.S.

A similar pattern has emerged in Canada. The week of Oct. 21, 2013, for example, The Big Bang Theory was the most-watched program on Canadian TV, with 3.46 million viewers, according to he Toronto tracking firm Numeris. One year later, the week of Oct. 20, 2014, The Big Bang Theory was still the most-watched program, but the number of viewers dropped to 3.14 million.

The downward trend is reflected across the board.

And yet more people seem to be talking about the TV shows they watch — on social media, in online chat forums and in comments posted on entertainment media sites — than at any time in the recent past, whether it’s Downton Abbey, The Walking Dead or the latest craziness on Jane the Virgin.

Richard E. Grant as Simon Bricker, left, and Elizabeth McGovern as Cora on Season 5 of Downton Abbey

The small screen is enjoying a resurgence in both popularity and respectability. More big-screen filmmakers are trying their hand on the small screen, from Academy Award screenwriter John Ridley, creator, head writer and showrunner of the soon-to-debut American Crim on CTV and ABC, to Oscar-winning actors like Matthew McConaughey in HBO’s True Detective and Frances McDormand in the HBO miniseries Olive Kitteridge, which recently earned McDormand a Screen Actors Guild Award. TV no longer carries the stigma it once did for screen stars concerned about their image.

And yet hardly a week goes by, it seems, that even popular programs like Modern Family and Survivor don’t record series lows in the overnight ratings.

Numbers are easy to spin, of course, but at least one research director at a major U.S. network says the numbers are misleading.

Alan Wurtzel, president of research and media development for NBC Universal, says the question — where have all the viewers gone? — is itself misleading.

The short answer, he says, is that they haven’t gone anywhere. Viewers are simply watching TV in new ways. And he has the empirical evidence to back his assertion.

Eric Stonestreet in Modern Family

Wurtzel tackled the issue of declining ratings head on at the recently concluded winter meeting of the Television Critics Association in Los Angeles.

Every six months, for the past 16 years, Wurtzel has compiled cumulative data from Nielsen Media Research, conducted viewer research surveys for NBC Universal and crunched numbers from marketing firms like Centris Marketing Science (centris.com) and New York-based eMarketer (emarketer.com).

And while not all truths are self-evident, he was adamant in his main assertion: The overnight numbers might not show it, but more people are watching more TV than ever before.

More important, he said, people are more engaged about what they watch. It’s just that, sports and live events aside, they no longer feel compelled to watch something as it’s being broadcast, minute by minute.

Among other things, Wurtzel found the following:

Lauren Cohen as Maggie in The Walking Dead

1. In the year 2000, on average, people watched 4.9 hours of TV, according to Nielsen figures, Wurtzel said. Today, it’s 5.8 hours a day.

“So there’s no question in my mind that people are spending more time with the medium.”

2. Research agencies like Centris and eMarketer have found a year-to-year growth in TV viewing whenever they do research on how people are spending their time.

“How much time do people have to watch TV?” Wurtzel asked rhetorically. “There are so many hours in a day, after all.”

The answer, he said, is smartphones, tablets and other portable devices.

“The fact of the matter is that when people can take a smartphone and watch a half-hour episode on a train or a bus as they’re commuting, that’s incremental viewing that was never possible before.”

3. Three things are at work, Wurtzel said: Changing behaviour, more content — more programs to choose from, at more times of the day — and the splintering of the general audience into smaller, more passionate segments.

“What stuns me when I look at the numbers is how profound these changes are, and how quickly they’re happening.”

4. Time-shifting is the new way of watching TV. In 2008, 83 per cent of all viewing was live, Wurtzel said. Today, that figure is 55 per cent.

In 2008, 17 per cent of viewing was time-shifted. In 2013, it was 41 per cent. Today, it’s almost half.

5. The number of DVRs on the market has actually flattened out, Wurtzel said.

“The number of people who have DVRs has stayed consistent, but actual DVR use is creeping up.

“The most important point is that the rating for DVR playback in prime time is five times the size of the four (U.S.) commercial networks combined. So it’s a serious player.”

6. As popular as DVRs are, the new player is video on demand, Wurtzel said.

“As the technology improves and the experience gets better, consumers are migrating from DVRs to VOD. Video streaming: no surprise. It’s growing, and continues to. Netflix is huge. About a year ago, it had 38 million subscribers (in the U.S.), Amazon Prime around 20 million. It’s hard to get exact numbers, because these guys don’t want to share them. But the fact of the matter is that Netflix made an announcement at the end of the year that they’ve reached the 40-million subscriber threshold. So there’s no question that’s a huge factor in what’s going on.”

7. Binge viewing is no longer a trend. It’s becoming a habit. Two-thirds of viewers now admit they binge view, Wurtzel said.

“Here’s the thing, and it’s something that’s really important: Half of all people over 50 binge.”

The top sources of binge viewing, Wurtzel said, are Netflix, DVRs and VOD, in that order.

“We asked viewers a pertinent question: Tell is which one of the following things you can’t live without. When we asked them a year ago, 19 per cent they can’t live without Netflix. Now it’s 28 per cent. Similarly, with the DVR, a year ago 23 per cent said they couldn’t live without it. Now it’s 27 per cent. That’s just in one year. In one year there has been a significant change in the use of these various devices and in people’s behaviour.”

8. Volume, volume, volume.

“There’s been an explosion in the amount of content people have available to them,” Wurtzel said. “Right now Nielsen measures around 1,200 channels.

“That’s not how many are out there. It’s how many Nielsen measures. When I started at NBC, 15 years ago, I put together a presentation called The Chamber of Horrors, which was a compilation of all the things that could go wrong in the business. At the time, Nielsen was measuring 200 channels, and we thought that was crazy. Back in 2000 there were 44 cable networks programming in prime time. All told, they programmed about 12,500 hours of programs.

“Today, there are 113 cable networks basically programming about 33,000 hours. Right now, the average home receives about 189 channels. That’s a 47-per-cent increase in just the last five or six years.

“That’s how fast things are moving.”

9. Despite the myriad choices, there will always be a place for standard broadcast television, Wurtzel insisted — the NBCs, CBSs and PBSs of the world, and, by extension, CTV, Global, City and CBC.

“Networks still have enormous reach. They are advertiser-supported media, and I’ve always felt that if networks didn’t exist, companies like Procter & Gamble would have to invent us.

“The bottom line is that these models have to sustainable. And that’s the interesting question moving forward.”

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/more-people-watching-tv-than-ever-before-with-video/feed0The Big Bang TheoryalxstrachanDownton Abbey/PBSModern Family/ABCThe Walking Dead/AMCJane the Virgin/The CWTV changes: Last Man on Earth, A.D., Fresh Off the Boat on taphttp://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/tv-changes-last-man-on-earth-a-d-fresh-off-the-boat-on-tap
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/tv-changes-last-man-on-earth-a-d-fresh-off-the-boat-on-tap#commentsFri, 23 Jan 2015 21:02:36 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=582365]]>PASADENA, Calif. — A down-market sitcom about a lifelong loser who wakes up one day to discover he’s the last man on earth. A historical epic from the producers of The Bible about the travails of Jesus’ disciples following the crucifixion. An eerie miniseries about unseen forces menacing a small town. A raucous comedy about an Asian-American family forging a new life in a new land. A crime procedural about investigators trying to crack cases in cyberspace.

These are just some of the midseason offerings broadcast networks ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC — and by extension Global, CTV and City — hope will rescue what some perceive to be a season of few breakout hits and declining ratings.

The broadcast networks paraded the stars and producers of their new series over the past two weeks at the industry’s semi-annual meeting of the Television Critics Association, and once again the biggest anticipation was reserved for the cable dramas. Examples include: Breaking Bad spinoff Better Call Saul on AMC, new seasons of Justified, Fargo and The Americans on FX, new seasons of True Detective and Game of Thrones on HBO, and so on, together with increasingly ascendant streaming services like Netflix, home of House of Cards and Orange is the New Black.

The broadcast networks remain the key to TV’s financial model, though, because they reach into every home, and are where the biggest, most talked-about events — from the Super Bowl to the Grammys and Oscars air every year. The 30-second commercial ad is what pays for the development, writing and production of broad-based crowd pleasers like CSI, NCIS, Grey’s Anatomy and The Big Bang Theory.

Will Forte as Phil Miller in The Last Man on Earth.

So when a new season goes by without a new network series that gets people talking the following morning, as Lost and Desperate Housewives did 10 years ago, there’s cause for concern.

The cable networks and specialty channels that air talked-about shows like Game of Thrones, True Detective and Fargo are owned by many of the same media companies that own and operate the broadcast networks, so there’s no cause yet for alarm.

There is concern, though. The reality is that more viewers will watch a repeat of The Big Bang Theory on CTV or CBS than will watch an entire season of Girls on HBO. So when an entire season goes by without the networks finding the next Big Bang Theory, there’s a growing feeling of disquiet. A hit like The Big Bang Theory pays for the many misses the studios and networks produce every year.

If anything emerged from the past two weeks of press conferences with TV executives and media analysts, though, it’s that audience habits themselves are changing, and the industry — never quick to adapt — is being forced to change with them.

Increasingly, overnight ratings are becoming yesterday’s news. More than one network president said they no longer even look at overnight ratings anymore. Instead, thanks to online streaming and PVRs, it’s all about “live-plus-seven” ratings — the number of people who watch any given program up to seven days after it’s aired.

Live events, from sports to award shows, big-ticket concerts and reality-competition programs, remain immune to the pressures facing traditional scripted programs. Viewers now have the ability to watch The Big Bang Theory or NCIS when they want to, but those same viewers want to see events like the Super Bowl, Oscars or even the finale of Survivor live, as they happen.

That’s why, despite falling ratings in some cases, reality programs like The Bachelor, Survivor, Dancing with the Stars, The Voice and American Idol will be around for many more seasons to come.

Jodi May as Leah, left, and Richard Coyle as Caiaphas in A.D.

Whether a new comedy about the last man on earth or an investigative procedural about cybercrime can hang on, though, is the multi-million dollar question, though.

No one was saying it, exactly, but the future of network TV may well be live sports, concerts, award shows and reality programs. Must-see TV has become must-find-time-to-watch-what-I-recorded-on-my-PVR.

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/tv-changes-last-man-on-earth-a-d-fresh-off-the-boat-on-tap/feed0The Last Man on EarthalxstrachanThe Last Man on Earth/FoxFresh Off the Boat/ABCA.D./NBCAmerican Idol tries to adjust to winds of change (with video)http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/american-idol-tries-to-adjust-to-winds-of-change-with-video
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/american-idol-tries-to-adjust-to-winds-of-change-with-video#commentsFri, 23 Jan 2015 17:39:09 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=582052]]>PASADENA, Calif. — As the music industry has changed, it was perhaps inevitable that American Idol would change with it.

Judges Harry Connick Jr., Keith Urban and Jennifer Lopez have noticed those changes, not only during Idol’s city audition phase but during the group get-togethers and live performance phase as well.

Not all the changes are for the better, but Idol remains, at its heart, a simple story about a quest for stardom.

“It’s a new time,” Lopez conceded.

Technology has hastened that change with the times. Technology has advanced to a point where a young musician can stay home and work alone with a laptop, rather than jam with others in a recording studio.

“It’s a little different with the singers, the contestants we see come into the room,” Lopez told Postmedia News. “The change is more of a producer/writer thing, that’s going to really change music in a big way. And it’s begun to already, if you ask me.”

Idol’s critics say the show has struggled to adapt with the times. It’s now in its 14th season — Idol first aired on June 11, 2002 — but the weekly formula remains much the same, from the early audition city shows to Hollywood Week and the group cuts, followed by several weeks of live performances of songs that have been performed countless times before, eventually culminating in a final audience vote to decide the winner.

Ratings have tailed off, but Urban insists there’s still something compelling — exciting, even — about shaping a raw, untested talent with the potential to be a star.

“First and foremost, you have to put the times in perspective,” Urban told Postmedia News. “This is not the same industry it was when Carrie Underwood won and went into. It’s not the same industry Kelly Clarkson won and went into. Everything is relative. Even the definition of a superstar — I’m not even sure what that is now, other than someone who is able to create and connect with an audience, a substantial audience, and be able to do that on a consistent basis. Is it about selling records these days? Not as much as it used to be. Finding a live audience is, obviously, crucial. What I love about this show, and why I love that (producer) Scott Borchetta is involved this season, is that it examines all aspects of singing and talent. Maybe they’re not very good live, but they maybe extraordinarily good at creating sonic pictures and paintings that connect with people.”

Connick Jr. said one of the unintended consequences of music being made easier through technology is that the music itself becomes homogenized. Connick Jr., a New Orleans native, made his mark in music by embracing his New Orleans roots in a way no one had before him.

Jennifer Lopez, centre, speaks with reporters

“There are many benefits to having all that technology in your back pocket, especially for young people,” Connick Jr. said. “It’s opened so many doors and provided creative opportunities for so many people who otherwise might not have had those opportunities. But one of the drawbacks — and I really noticed this in New Orleans — is that people were coming in who were from New Orleans but didn’t sound like they were from New Orleans, when they spoke, when they sang.

“There was nothing indigenous about the music. It could have been from anywhere. I think that comes from being influenced by anything, anywhere, anytime, which is what technology does. I hate to be one of those people who says, ‘When I was a kid,’ but when I was a kid they didn’t have this. In my world, we just went down to Bourbon Street. That was my world. I was hoping to see people who really looked and sounded like they were from New Orleans. And, man, they could have been from anywhere.

“Accessibility has many blessings, but one of the drawbacks is that everything is becoming melted down. And it’s kind of sad.”

Connick Jr. still has time for American Idol, though. He did not need to sign on — he’s juggling several music projects at once — but he always liked the idea of encouraging and mentoring new talent.

Harry Connick Jr. speaks with reporters

“Somebody came up to me a while ago and said, ‘I don’t like American Idol. I think young musicians should pay their dues.’ I said, ‘OK, let me explain something to you. When you audition for American Idol, even if you’re out in the first round, I would call that experience. You’ve experienced something.

“If you make it all the way to the end and win American Idol, you have basically taken six, eight, 10 months out of your year and dedicated it to the most rigorous, intensive, high-pressure experience you’re likely to have in that compressed amount of time. You’re surrounded by people who are constantly telling you things that will help you improve your craft. And that is about the best experience you can get as a musician.’

“Look, I’m a jazz musician. I’ve heard a lot of jazz musicians say, ‘I’m not sure about this.’ Well, I give it up to anybody who can get up on the American Idol stage and take that ride. It’s one of the most gruelling entertainment experiences I‘ve ever seen. There is not one negative thing I can say about the Idol experience. Hobbling the music industry? No, man, I’m completely the opposite of that. I think it’s an amazing opportunity for young people.”

American Idol airs Thursdays, Fox

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/american-idol-tries-to-adjust-to-winds-of-change-with-video/feed0American IdolalxstrachanAmerican Idol/FoxAmerican Idol/FoxAmerican Idol/FoxDavid Arquette’s show a new way for celebs to embarrass themselveshttp://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/david-arquettes-show-a-new-way-for-celebs-to-embarrass-themselves
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/david-arquettes-show-a-new-way-for-celebs-to-embarrass-themselves#commentsThu, 22 Jan 2015 18:33:05 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=582248]]>If celebrity culture is the funhouse mirror that reflects our idealized selves, then David Arquette is in the business of proving the distortion isn’t as great as we think. Like us, celebrities can be goofy and unpolished and prone to mistakes. And for Arquette, the connection is all relative.

“My grandfather Cliff Arquette played a character named Charley Weaver, and he was on the old Hollywood Squares,” he says. “I was really young at the time and we lived across the country, but I was able to watch him on TV. I got to know him and his sense of humour through that.”

Arquette is a third generation actor, along with his siblings Rosanna, Patricia, Richmond and Alexis. His latest venture is Celebrity Name Game, a syndicated game show that pairs stars and everyday folk who guess famous names based on clues to win cash. In Canada, it airs daily at 7:30 p.m. ET on GameTV.

The idea of celebrities loosening up for the camera is a TV favourite that resurfaces every few years. The 1960s were a heyday that brought shows including The Match Game and Password, while subsequent decades heralded Win, Lose or Draw, Pyramid and the like.

Nowadays, NBC’s booze-soaked Hollywood Game Night is stumbling into its third season, and the Canadian remake of Match Game airs weekdays on Comedy. Turning the concept in to viral Internet bait, The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon pits its Everyman host against stars, dousing them in water, bouncing giant balls at their faces and making them chug beer while wearing inflatable suits.

Courteney Cox, left, David Arquette and a contestant on Celebrity Name Game. [GameTV]

The shows work because the relationship between fans and celebrities is reciprocal — we feed their need to entertain, and they feed our need to be entertained. But like a heady night of parlour games and pandemonium, it works best when no one takes it seriously.

“My family loves playing games, so we came up with the idea through a board game called Identity Crisis — essentially just version of the game Celebrity,” says Arquette. “We just turned a game that you play in your living room into something that was a little flashier, more fun, involves real celebrities and people can win money.”

Along with FremantleMedia North America, Arquette produces the show with his ex-wife Courteney Cox through their company Coquette Productions, still active despite their divorce in 2012. Coquette has also produced cult TV series Cougar Town, the tabloid-magazine drama Dirt and last year’s film Just Before I Go.

“We’re dear friends and we work together well. We’ve been building this business for over 10 years, so just because our relationship doesn’t work out doesn’t mean that you throw the baby out with the bathwater,” Arquette says.

The pair hired Craig Ferguson as Celebrity Name Game’s affable ringmaster. The former host of The Late Late Show likes to refer to himself as a “vulgar lounge entertainer”, but Arquette is more generous.

“What he brings is that relaxed, Second City kind of attitude. He’s always in the moment, he’s always engaged, he’s always connected to the contestants, audience and viewers at home. It becomes the kind of show you can turn on and forget about your problems for a second and laugh.”

Craig Ferguson, centre, presides over an episode of Celebrity Name Game. [GameTV]

What’s also key, he says, is the roster of celebrities who show up to play. Guests this season include funny people such as Cox’s Friends co-star Lisa Kudrow, David Alan Grier (In Living Color) and Cheri Oteri (Saturday Night Live). Cox and Arquette also pop by.

“Will Sasso (of MADtv) was really funny — he’s Canadian,” says Arquette. “I think Canada has produced some of the greatest comedians of all time. Dan Aykroyd to John Candy to Martin Short. It really is a staggering list.”

A Los Angeles resident since he was five years old, Arquette appeared in the films Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Airheads early in his career and became known for playing Deputy Dewey in the Scream slasher movies. Not as successful, though, was his stint as a World Championship Wrestling winner, the Propr Clothing store he and singer Ben Harper founded, and his short-lived rock/hip-hop band Ear2000.

“It’s weird growing up in L.A. When you’re around here for as long as I have been as an actor, 27 years, you see a lot of roller coasters. A lot of the time, half of the game is just sticking around, continuing working. You get knocked down sometimes and pull yourself back up. You never know when the stars align and you’re going to do something that the audience connects with,” he says.

“That’s the goal for me — to entertain people. So sometimes you do things that miss the mark, but once in a while everything sort of lines up. You’re functioning on a level of entertaining more people and bringing them more joy.”

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/david-arquettes-show-a-new-way-for-celebs-to-embarrass-themselves/feed0David Arquettemhank2012Celebrity Name GameCelebrity Name GameThe Americans creator Joe Weisberg talks real-life events in Russia (with video)http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/the-americans-creator-joe-weisberg-talks-real-life-events-in-russia-with-video
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/the-americans-creator-joe-weisberg-talks-real-life-events-in-russia-with-video#commentsThu, 22 Jan 2015 03:07:37 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=582009]]>“Are we really happy hereWith this lonely game we playLooking for words to saySearching but not findingUnderstanding anywhereWe’re lost in a masquerade.”— Leon Russell, This Masquerade, 1972

PASADENA, Calif. — Joe Weisberg once worked for the CIA, during the Soviet era. Few writers, then, were in a better position or better qualified to create The Americans, a Ronald Reagan-era spy drama starring Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys as KGB agents posing as an all-American couple living in the Washington, D.C. suburbs in the 1980s.

In the two seasons The Americans has been on the air, Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings — happily married parents of two seemingly well-adjusted, all-American teenagers — have spied on the neighbours and happily passed on their neighbours’ secrets to their minders back in the Kremlin.

Part of Weisberg’s calculus, along with co-writer and showrunner Joel Fields and co-executive producer Graham Yost, was that viewers, knowing that Russia would evolve to become a benign democracy in a post-Cold War world, would secretly root for the Jennings family, despite themselves.

Now that calculus has been thrown out of whack, Weisberg admitted to Postmedia News.

Keri Russell in The Americans.

“I personally think it’s screwing everything up,” he said, putting on a brave face. “We all thought Russia was supposed to be this nice, friendly country. We were supposed to be getting along fine. This story would show everyone, ‘Look, we thought of them as the enemy but now look at how nice they are now.’ And now they’re acting crazy again. It’s not helping.”

Weisberg has been caught off-balance by real-world events over the past year involving the Russian Federation, Ukraine and one certain Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the ex-KGB officer — Putin served in the KGB and FSB for 16 years, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel before retiring to enter politics in his native St. Petersburg in 1991 — who’s thrown a wrench into Russian-American relations and prompted talk by some of a new Cold War.

With The Americans about to begin its third season — it returns Jan. 28 on FX — Weisberg is scratching his head about how audiences are likely to perceive his TV heroes, now that history is suddenly more murky.

Weisberg wanted to be a spy himself from the time he read John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold as an 11-year-old. He studied Soviet history at Yale University during his college years, then joined the CIA, where he served as a trainee analyst and recruiter for five years, between 1990 and 1994.

The job was more desk-bound than anything George Smiley or James Bond might have been involved in, but Weisberg was a quick study. He soon learned about the dark underbelly of deception and subterfuge, and the moral quagmire of spying on unsuspecting neighbours. He saw how double agents were being recruited at high risk but little money, and he began to see himself as more of a Le Carré-type spy novelist than George Smiley the spy.

Keri Russell, left, and Matthew Rhys in The Americans

Weisberg conceived of The Americans as a family-driven mystery, where the parents don’t tell their children what they really do for a living until they have to, or it’s too late.

As The Americans returns for a new season, that moment may have arrived. Elizabeth Jennings is in favour of telling their teen daughter Paige, played by Canadian Holly Taylor, and recruiting her to the cause. Phillip Jennings, meanwhile, is just as adamant that Paige be kept in the dark, as she’s old enough now at 16 to live a normal life, free of deception and intrigue. The tension between the couple threatens to tear the family apart, expose their identity to ever-present CIA operatives and ruin their children’s lives forever. That tension will inform the entire season, Weisberg suggested.

Real-world events will not change The American’s fictional story in any substantial way, Weisberg acknowledged, but it may affect the way viewers look at the show. The Americans’ message, to the extent there is one, is that time changes perception, and that “the enemy” to one generation is not necessarily an enemy to the generations that follow.

The Americans’ new season will widen the scope beyond Washington, D.C., in the Reagan years to show what was happening in Russia at the time, too.

A subplot involving Russian embassy functionary Nina Sergeevna, played by Annet Mahendru, will find her back in Russia, picking up the pieces of her blown cover.

In just one more example of The Americans’ canny casting, Mahendru was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, to a Russian mother and South Asian father. Mahendru is unsure of her character’s fate; she told U.S. News & World Report in May that her character might not even make it to the airport in one piece, so who knows? It’s a measure of The Americans’ worldliness and sophistication — not to mention topicality — that cast members are being interviewed in U.S. News & World Report, and not just People and Entertainment Weekly.

“I get excited every time I say or think ‘Lefortovo Prison’. I worry a little that I’m the only one, but I think it’s great.”

The characters in The Americans are lost in a masquerade, and Weisberg for one is happy to keep them that way.

For now.

“Our inclination, despite everything, is to keep trying to make the show better and tell the best stories we can. In a way, I think that’s all we know how to do. We don’t know how to shift the show or do X, Y or Z to get more of an audience. But we do know how to take this story and these characters and shape them and tell it better.

“It’s so funny when you say the parents look as if they’re about to put their kids first. I immediately think, not just in TV but in real life, too. We’re so used to seeing the kids always coming first. It gets a little irritating.”

The Americans returns Jan. 28, FX Canada

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/the-americans-creator-joe-weisberg-talks-real-life-events-in-russia-with-video/feed0The AmericansalxstrachanThe Americans/FXThe Americans/FXThe Americans/FXJay Baruchel wants to fix Canada’s sitcoms (and the CBC)http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/jay-baruchel-fix-canadian-tv-cbc
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/jay-baruchel-fix-canadian-tv-cbc#commentsWed, 21 Jan 2015 18:20:37 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=581617]]>Jay Baruchel may well be the last Canadian comedy star holdout – a prospect so conceptually absurd that his pals James Franco and Seth Rogen based their own $32 million film around it. But for all the well-meaning derision hurled in his northerly direction, the Ottawa-born, Montreal-based actor has no misgivings about wearing his Maple Leaf pride on his chest (literally). Most recently, Baruchel proved this steadfast allegiance to the producers of his Chicago-set FXX series, Man Seeking Woman.

“I really wanted to work close to home,” he recalled during a break from shooting in a Toronto-area church. “I was just like, ‘Y’know, it’d be pretty cool if you did it up here since we’ve got some of the best crews in the world here and some of the world’s funniest people…’ and everyone’s like, ‘Well, they don’t do a lot of American half-hour comedies north of the border.’ So I said, ‘So? What’s your point?’

“Maybe now they will. I’m really psyched about that. Maybe now we’re opening the country up so that it’s not just for Supernatural and Suits so that all sorts of cool shit can be done here too because why the fuck not?”

As his salty language suggests, the topic of quality Canadian comedy shows (specifically, the current lack of them) is an issue close to the 32-year-old’s heart. “You can come up with a bunch of examples but for each one of those I’d say Kids in the Hall and Trailer Park Boys,” he says, but later admits the only current comedy show – Canadian or otherwise – he finds funny is the American series Workaholics (Man Seeking Woman aside).

There’s an old boys club up here. Once you’re in, you’re in for good.

The problem, then, according to Baruchel, is not the talent (“Trailer Park Boys wasn’t even made in Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver, that’s in Halifax for God’s sakes!”) but rather the dual failures of government funding for our public broadcaster and the legacy acts which it and other homegrown media continue to endorse without discrimination.

Leaning in as if possessed by the need to speak his mind, Baruchel explained his position on why Canada’s comedies have a bad reputation and how we can fix it. His argument is transcribed below:

“Listen, I think there’s often a disparity and that comes down to we don’t have the same resources to play with that they do [in America].

Also, there’s a bit of an old boys club up here. Once you’re in, you’re in for good and regardless of the quality you’ll still get to make your thing. So the gag is finding a way to get the good people in there. And I think we’re showing more and more that we can compete. I think Trailer Park Boys, for example, opened the door for [Baruchel co-written hockey film] Goon, and Goon was number one here when it opened.

So yeah, there has been a lot of shit television [in Canada], but there’s a lot of shit television in the States too. My friend Jacob Tierney [who directed Baruchel in The Trotsky] put it perfectly when he said we have to get to a point where watching Canadian movies and TV doesn’t feel like homework. It should just be good. Period. And there’s different ways to get to that. We’re scratching the surface of that [now] but I don’t think cutting funding to the CBC is the best way to do that. I think it’s quite the opposite. If you look at how much every taxpayer in Britain pays into the BBC and compare that to how much we pay into the CBC it’s nothing, and that’s a shame because the CBC is all of ours and it gave the world a bunch of great stuff.

So it’s this weird thing where you’ve got to walk a tightrope of patriotism and creativity. Ideally, the two can inform eachother but they rarely do.”

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/jay-baruchel-fix-canadian-tv-cbc/feed0Jay Baruchel,jonathandekelGraham Yost philosophical as Justified nears the end of the trailhttp://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/graham-yost-philosophical-as-justified-nears-the-end-of-the-trail
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/graham-yost-philosophical-as-justified-nears-the-end-of-the-trail#commentsWed, 21 Jan 2015 17:23:35 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=580743]]>PASADENA, Calif. — Justified is about to reach the final fork in the trail, only Graham Yost doesn’t know yet which fork to take.

Yost had better lasso that horse soon, though, because he’ll be filming the final episode of one of television’s most admired and avidly followed dramas in a matter of weeks, if not days.

When the Etobicoke, Ont. native and Emmy nominated co-writer of the HBO miniseries The Pacific adapted crime writer Elmore Leonard’s novella Fire in the Hole, he had little idea it would last six seasons, or that after all that time it would still be both critically acclaimed and widely seen.

Justified, for those who haven’t seen it, is a modern-day western about a blood feud in the heart of Kentucky coal-mining country. Leonard’s readers and casual viewers alike have avidly followed every twist and turn of a thorny, often unpredictable tale of a headstrong U.S. marshal, Raylan Givens, played by Timothy Olyphant, and his boyhood best friend, now an unapologetic, unrepentant career criminal, Boyd Crowder, played by Walton Goggins.

Leonard, Yost’s mentor, creative partner and spiritual muse during Justified’s formative years, passed away in 2013, and Yost knows he will have to resolve Givens and Crowder’s conflict without the counsel and advice of the man who both created Justified’s larger-than-life characters and served as a sounding board for Yost’s ideas about where the story should turn next.

Walton Goggins as Boyd Crowder in Justified

Justified’s final season premières Jan. 27 on Super Channel, with the series ending in April. Yost, writer-producer Fred Golan and lead director Michael Dinner have already filmed 10 of the 13 remaining episodes.

Yost admitted, though, that while he and Leonard talked about possible endings, he hasn’t decided Crowder and Givens’ fate.

“We’ve been talking about how to end this thing probably since about Season 3,” Yost said. “And it changes every year.”

Yost has decided on the tone, if not the details.

“It’s going to be totally depressing,” he said, deadpan. “Because what Elmore liked was really depressing.”

Translation: He isn’t saying.

Timothy Olyphant as Raylan Givens in Justified

Readers familiar with Leonard’s fast-paced, often witty novels knows he had an uncanny touch for deft, fast-moving endings in which the hero wins — usually with an unexpected, unpredictable feint or sleight-of-hand rather than a predictable shoot-‘em-up — and leave readers feeling satisfied at the same time.

“Depressing” was not in Leonard’s vocabulary. It was one of the reasons he was one of the most widely read and popular crime novelists of his generation.

“We’re shooting No. 10 now,” Yost said. “We have a script for 11, and we’re going to be banging on that for the next week. We’re also breaking in and outlining 12, and then we’ll get into 13.

“That doesn’t mean we haven’t been thinking about the ending. We’ve all been talking about the ending, but that’s all it’s been — talk. Elmore never did outlines. He’d just start writing, and if he didn’t like where it was going he would just throw out the pages and start again. You can’t do that when you’re doing a television show, except to the degree that, as you get near the end, you have a certain amount of flexibility.

Graham Yost

“We’re going to have to do it pretty quickly, though. And that’s daunting because, right now, we absolutely don’t know how this is going to end. It won’t end with them being burned down in a house. Other than that, everything’s pretty much open.”

Yost admitted that working so closely with Leonard moulded some of his own writing habits over time.

“I’m the same incredibly humble guy I’ve always been” Yost quipped. “Seriously, I did have a realization earlier today — that applies not just to me but all the writers — that, in my next job, I can’t write like this ever again. Or else it will feel like I’m doing more Elmore. Writing like Elmore, or at least trying to write like Elmore, has been an incredible privilege and a lot of fun, but it’s time to let go.”

Television may be in a golden age, but Derek Miller is more concerned with guilt than gilt. The Juno-winning singer-songwriter hosts a late-night TV series that tackles social issues, knocks down taboos and occasionally enjoys some bikini-clad dancers along the way.

Airing on APTN, Guilt Free Zone is the only current late-night show in Canada that holds to the traditional late-night format — monologue, guests, skits, performance. It’s something we haven’t seen north of the border since The Mike Bullard Show ended its run on Global in 2003.

“Canada doesn’t have a variety show where talent can come on and say they have a new movie or album. We used to have it with (George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight), but it wasn’t something where an actual performer sang or did a standup routine or danced.

“But on top of that, it’s important to do this because of the settler and indigenous collective guilt,” he says, referring to Canadian settlers’ history of dominating aboriginals and how it affected the aboriginal psyche.

“I thought this was a great opportunity to explore things and get to it with comedy, satire and truth. As long as that relationship isn’t good, there’s always going to be a need for communication, and what better way than to laugh about some things?”

Ironically, Miller came up with the idea for the truth-speaking series while playing a game based on bluffing.

“We were playing poker about eight years ago, saying we should do a show where we can talk about whatever we want and not get caught up in how we’re being represented in the media,” he says. “It’s good to show people that we’re human, too. We like to laugh. We f—. We do things.”

Thus, six episodes were filmed in front of diverse live-studio audiences in Toronto, Winnipeg, Regina, Hamilton and Montreal. Topics have ranged from STDs to legalizing marijuana, and whether you can develop “man boobs” from smoking too much marijuana.

There’s been a man dressed as the devil and a segment about Pockets Warhol, the painting monkey. Performers this season include singer Inez Jasper, hip-hop artist Plex, comedian Lucas Jacko, burlesque dancer Miss Lou Lou la Duchesse de Riere and Regina rockers The Snake Oil Salesmen.

Miller says he drew inspiration from shows like The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live, but putting it all together has been a lark and a challenge.

“There was such a fricking shotgun approach to this thing. We would just get in a room with writers and I would just riff for hours and people would write down stuff I said and we’d try to hone it. There was no plan, really,” he says, noting that last-minute revisions were common.

“At first we had the network saying, ‘Calm it down, calm it down.’ And then when they saw the show live they said, ‘Turn it up, turn it up,’ so we were doing rewrites just before the show.

“We’re just trying to create something that gets conversations going. APTN was a little scared at first, but I think they grew a little bit more balls as we got going.”

“He’s awful.” Hanson said cheerfully. “He’s just awful. In the books, Backstrom has absolutely no redeeming values. He’s not even a very good detective. He just takes credit for what other people do, much like a showrunner.

“The one change we made for network TV was to make him very good at his job and take all those bad qualities that he has in the book and turn them into a tool for solving crimes.”

Wilson played Asperger’s-syndrome poster child Dwight Schrute for nine seasons on The Office, and is not new to playing socially awkward but near-brilliant characters. The main difference between Dwight Schrute and PORTLAND, Oregon Det. Lt. Everett Backstrom, is that Backstrom is arguably even more abrasive, inappropriate and ill-mannered than Schrute.

Wilson wasn’t looking to do another series so soon after The Office — “I almost fired my agent on the spot,” he said dryly — but he was won over by the character and by Hanson’s original pilot script.

The cast of Blackstrom

“Interesting varied parts with lots of different facets and colours and textures don’t come along very often for weird looking, 48-year-old … white dudes,” Wilson said. “I needed to do it.”

Wilson can relate to someone whose life is falling apart and uses humour to survive. The character Backstrom wears his heart on his sleeve, even as his life is unravelling.

“Watching the show is a kind of process. At first, you’re thinking to yourself, ‘Oh, wow, this guy’s a racist and sexist.’ And then you think, ‘Oh, wow, you know what? He kind of hates everybody.’ And then you think, ‘Oh, wow, he hates himself worse than he hates anyone else. What’s going on with that?’ It’s asking a lot of an audience, but I think it’s an interesting journey.”

Wilson sees parallels with real life.

Rainn Wilson in Blackstrom

“Watching a brilliant detective at work, while things are just not working for him, is interesting to me. I’d rather hang out with that person than a slick procedural detective who’s got all the answers and speaks in these effortless clips as their CSI team looks at every microfibre and everything gets resolved perfectly every week. It’s human. It’s frail. And it’s interesting.”

Backstrom wouldn’t work as a TV series if viewers didn’t relate to the character on some level, Hanson admitted.

“We hope viewers will watch long enough to realize that what he’s saying does not come from a ‘bad human being’ place,” Hanson said. “It comes from a bad place in a human being.”

Wilson was more blunt.

Rainn Wilson in Blackstrom

“Like the ad campaign says, he’s a total dick. But there’s a beautiful arc that Hart has written over these 13 episodes where all the other characters get to see another side of him, see what makes him tick and how he got that way. It gives you a lot as an actor. Yes, this guy’s an ass, but once you get to know him you learn bit by bit about his coping mechanisms.”

Robert Forster has been cast as Backstrom’s father; Sarah Chalke will play his ex-fiancee.

“Every character has a different voice, which is something I appreciate so much. They speak differently. They use words differently. They see the world differently, and it’s reflected in the dialogue. As basic as that sounds, as much as you might think to yourself, ‘Well, duh, that’s judy how life is,’ think about how few television shows, especially procedural, have characters who speak differently, react differently and have a truly distinctive voice.”

Backstrom premières Thursday, Jan. 22, Fox, City

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/rainn-wilson-plays-defective-detective-in-new-show-backstrom/feed0BackstromalxstrachanBlackstrom/FoxBlackstrom/FoxBlackstrom/FoxBones creator preps to debut new show Backstromhttp://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/bones-creator-preps-to-debut-new-show-backstrom
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/bones-creator-preps-to-debut-new-show-backstrom#commentsTue, 20 Jan 2015 16:06:04 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=580004]]>PASADENA, Calif. — “I’m a middle-aged man in Hollywood; what am I doing here?” Hart Hanson quipped, trying to find a quiet place to talk to a visiting reporter from home. He eventually settled on the lee side of a potted palm, within earshot of a raucous, increasingly loud coming-out party for the Fox network’s midseason shows, but not so close that he’d get run over by stampeding paparazzi in their mission to grab a shot of Jennifer Lopez.

Hanson, American-born but raised in Canada — he still calls himself a Canadian, and proudly so — cut his teeth as a writer on homegrown dramas such as The Odyssey, Road to Avonlea, North of 60, Street Legal and Traders, before a stint teaching creative writing at the University of B.C. while studying for his MFA.

Hanson moved to Los Angeles and worked briefly on the various series Cupid, Snoops, Judging Amy and Joan of Arcadia, before creating the long-running crime procedural, Bones, in 2005. Bones, still on the air, is now in its 10th season, with 200 episodes and counting. New episodes return in March.

Hanson’s new series, Backstrom, stars The Office’s Rainn Wilson as an irascible but unnaturally gifted police detective and is based on the Swedish novel by Leif G.W. Persson. It debuts Thursday, Jan. 22 and Hanson, for one, is happy with the result so far.

He still isn’t used to the Hollywood regimen of red-carpet walks, press conferences and appearances at Comic-Con, though.

Hart Hanson, left, and executive producer Stephen Nathan [Fox]

“I dedicate my life to being behind the scenes, and all of a sudden I’m sitting on a dais with actors,” Hanson said good-naturedly. “For 10 years I’ve been doing that, and I just hate it. This is not my thing.”

Backstrom is set in PORTLAND, Oregon, but Hanson settled on Vancouver as a filming location — for the tax breaks, he readily admitted and, just as importantly, for the crew. Hanson inherited much of the Vancouver crew that worked on the Fox drama Almost Human, and he couldn’t be happier with the result. Hanson finds himself torn between two homes: Los Angeles, where Bones has been anchored for more than a decade now, and Vancouver, where he both taught and got his first break in scriptwriting.

Quite by coincidence, a sequence in the pilot episode was filmed at UBC, a stone’s throw from the very same office he worked in as a teacher.

“It is delightful, for me, to go back to Vancouver.”

Hanson has fond memories of being a teacher, but he eventually realized it wasn’t for him.

“I wasn’t spinning my wheels exactly, but there were several reasons why I felt teaching wore on me. And the biggest one was that I would get so tired of my voice pontificating on something that I didn’t feel I was qualified to pontificate on. I worked very hard to teach. My students did well, and I liked them, and I especially liked that some of them did well afterward.

Hart Hanson, centre, chats with reporters [Fox]

“I could easily have ended up spending my life being on that faculty, but it was not my calling. It was such hard work. Teaching is really hard, really hard. Especially if you get sick, as I do even now, of hearing yourself talk. It was fine to talk about the work, but the theoretical side I found really hard.”

Hanson said when, during filming, he looked up and saw his old office window, he felt a bittersweet pang of emotion.

“I went up to see who was still there,” he said quietly. “I had to see who was still there, these people I adored, and some of them were still there. I was lucky to get that job at the time, and I’ve never forgotten that. There’s so much luck involved in this, what I do. When something hits, if you’re cocky about it, then you’re insane. So many things have to come together to be successful. Bones has gone for 10 years, and people ask me all the time, ‘What’s the secret?’ The secret is to be very, very fortunate. I don’t know how you teach that or convey that, but I think it’s important to acknowledge it.

“The other life I might have had was to live in this beautiful city, teach in this building and live on Bowen Island. I can see that other life, and there’s an odd melancholy, a very bittersweet feeling there.

“Why don’t you get to live for 400 years and do everything?”

Backstrom premières Thursday, Jan. 22, Fox, City

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/bones-creator-preps-to-debut-new-show-backstrom/feed0Hart HansonalxstrachanHart HansonHart HansonDegrassi writer launches new teen mystery series Open Hearthttp://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/degrassi-writer-launches-new-teen-mystery-series-open-heart
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/degrassi-writer-launches-new-teen-mystery-series-open-heart#commentsMon, 19 Jan 2015 22:15:34 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=580492]]>Slight, smiling and sandy haired, Ramona Barckert is almost indistinguishable from the actors who star on her new teen series for YTV, Open Heart. Her words flow as freely as soda pop, and her laugh is just as bubby.

The creator and executive producer says it’s simple to understand today’s tech-savvy teens if you can just remember your own youth, and it’s easy to believe her. After all, she earned an Emmy nomination and Canadian Screen Award for her writing on teen TV staple Degrassi.

Still, even she can find it difficult to click the light fantastic quick enough to stay in the loop.

“Having been around the Degrassi fandom for as much as I have, I try to keep up. Social media is a big element of their lives, and I’m pretty active on it figuring out what their interests are, what they’re thinking, where the culture of teen girls is drifting,” she says.

“It’s hard because they move very fast. They’re into one thing one day and you think you have a handle on it, and the next they’re onto something else. But if you come back to the universal themes of identity, family, love and friendship, no matter how much the world is changing, they still ring true.”

Open Heart centres on 16-year-old Dylan Blake (Karis Cameron), the youngest in a family of doctors who rebels when her father disappears. After staging a break-and-enter gone wrong with her friends, Dylan is forced to volunteer at the hospital where her mother and sister work, and she’s quick to find trouble. Looming largest in her mind, though, is the mystery surrounding her dad.

The cast of Open Heart [YTV/Corus]

“The original idea was to try and find a unique world to put a teen drama in. Kids are familiar with a lot of the tropes of a hospital show or a mystery or a family drama, and the idea was to takes those three words and see what we could come up with,” Barckert says.

Given the success of the current teen series du jour, Pretty Little Liars, Barckert knew there was a market for a serialized mythology-based show packed with cryptic clues and conspiracies.

“I worked on Degrassi for two seasons as a staff writer before I started freelancing for them, and I think that show is about the authentic teen experience and all the universal things that teens go through. With Open Heart, we wanted to find something that was a little more genre-focused,” she says.

“One influence for me personally is Buffy the Vampire Slayer — it’s one of my favourite shows. I always love to watch a teen girl being a badass hero and determined to take on the bad guys. Secondarily, Veronica Mars was something that we looked at to focus on clue-building and the quirkiness of the characters who live in the hospital.”

Before being immersed in teen and preteen fare, Barckert wrote for rom-com shows such as The Smart Woman Survival Guide, The Dating Guy, the TV movie For the Love of Grace and the film At Home By Myself … with You.

“I think I’ve always been telling stories whether I knew I was doing it or lot,” she says. “I was always writing little plays and stories, coming up with little sketches all through elementary school. As I grew older I was like, ‘I’m going to be a novelist and write great literature.’ But always in the back of my mind I loved film and television. I loved the idea of crafting a story that way.”

Open Heart debuts Tuesday, Jan. 20, on YTV.

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/degrassi-writer-launches-new-teen-mystery-series-open-heart/feed0Ramona Barckertmhank2012Open HeartParks and Recreation prepares for posterity (with video)http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/parks-and-recreation-prepares-for-posterity-with-video
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/parks-and-recreation-prepares-for-posterity-with-video#commentsMon, 19 Jan 2015 20:58:57 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=579994]]>PASADENA, Calif. — Parks and Recreation is the definition of a cult comedy. When the gentle parable about small-town life in the American heartland comes to an end next month after 125 episodes and seven seasons, it will go down in TV annals as a slight but sweet comedy, modestly rated most weeks but avidly followed by those who watched.

For Michael Schur, a former writer for The Office who co-created Parks and Recreation with Simpsons co-producer Greg Daniels in 2009, the real question now is whether an eccentric but modestly rated comedy like Parks and Recreation — or even The Office, for that matter — would be able to make it in today’s TV environment, where impatient network executives coupled with an increasingly fickle and easily distracted TV audience, make it hard for any new comedy to stick, unless it has the broad appeal of a Big Bang Theory.

It’s no accident that Tina Fey, creative soulmate of Parks and Recreation’s lead actor Amy Poehler, has turned to Netflix with her new comedy, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

“The state of network television is in flux,” Schur told reporters, at the winter meeting of the Television Critics Association. “It’s impossible to anticipate which shows would work in which era. You could ask the same question about Seinfeld or Cheers: Could they work today? In baseball, you often hear fans ask about Babe Ruth — if he were playing today, could he hit Major League pitching? There’s no way to answer that really, unless you use advanced sabermetric stats.”

Amy Poehler, left, and Nick Offerman in Parks and Recreation.

Parks and Recreation struggled in the beginning. It was never a major hit, but it clung to life long enough to last seven seasons. Despite advances in consumer technology that allow consumers to watch what they want when they want, some constants remain, Schur said.

“I think all that matters ultimately is whether a new show finds a group of people that it speaks to, who watch it whenever it’s on, who really care about it and who are vocal about caring about it. We were lucky enough to be in that situation. I don’t think that’s any different today than it was in 2009, when we launched. Any show that launches today just needs a decent size audience to care about it. And if they do, it will stick around.”

Streaming services like Netflix have changed the TV landscape, but how long those changes will last — or even what those changes are exactly — is still an open question, Schur said.

“We’re developing a show you can watch on the back of your eyelids,” Poehler quipped. “While you walk down the street.”

“Oh, it’s not good,” Poehler said. “You can only watch it when you’re walking down the street. You have to be in motion. It’s called a walk-and-watch.”

“Seriously, timing will tell on streaming,” Schur said. “This is the nascent era of streaming television. The most important streamer of television right now is Netflix, and they literally won’t tell anyone how many people watch their shows. There’s no real way to gauge it except that, over time, we’ll get a sense of what’s working and what isn’t. The thing that makes me personally happy is that, the way things are going, shows like Parks and Recreation will have a very long tail. They’ll be out there on people’s computers forever, in theory, or until the robots destroy us. Until then, people will have the opportunity to watch the show. That makes me very happy as a person who worked on it.”

As for Parks and Recreation’s final days, Schur would promise only that the key players will be there at the very end, including Poehler, Chris Pratt, Aziz Ansari, Adam Scott, Jim O’Heir, Retta and Nick Offerman.

“I haven’t edited the episode yet but in the last moments of the show everybody is in the same place at the same time,” Schur said. “We had the luxury of going into the season knowing it was the final season and having it laid out in front of us. We didn’t come up with the exact idea for how it was going to end until later, though. Inevitably, there are always certain things that are going to happen that are more enjoyable for people have been close watchers of the series.

“It’s important to keep those things in the margins, though, make them more Easter-eggy, like hidden treats. Because the goal is always to do a good, funny half-hour of television that is relatable. It must always be possible for someone watching for the first time to be able to follow it and enjoy it.

Chris Pratt, right, in Parks and Recreation

“It’s hard after 120 episodes, because the characters have such complicated lives by that point, but we always try to tell stories that are enjoyable. So if you catch it on a plane or online, or wherever, hopefully you’re thinking to yourself, ‘That seems funny, I like those people, I could watch more of this.’ The goal is always to have the story stand on its own, regardless of whether you’ve seen it before. And I think that’s true of the end.”

“We do say goodbye to some of the people in town,” Poehler added, deadpan. “Some of the ancillary characters. A lot of them get to say goodbye in different ways, by leaving or dying or … ”

PASADENA, Calif. — Geraldo Rivera was in the room, together with potential apprentices such as Kate Gosselin, Ian Ziering, Vivica A. Fox, Leeza Gibbons, Kenya Moore and Mark Burnett. But of course one head towered above them all, literally and figuratively, and that was the giant head of one Donald John Trump, Sr., the real-estate tycoon whose shock of is-it-orange-or-is-it-white hair was once famously likened to a cover shot in Architectural Digest.

Burnett, the larger-than-life media mogul behind Survivor, The Voice and The Apprentice, and Rivera, the former day-time talk-show host and Fox News personality known for such TV classics as The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vaults, are not the kind of celebrities to be caught at a loss for words. Trump, though, is in a whole other league. To paraphrase the once-famous TV ads for the brokerage firm E.F. Hutton, when Donald Trump talks, people listen.

Even if they don’t want to.

The chairman and president of The Trump Organization and founder of Trump Entertainment Resorts, was in fine fettle Friday at the Television Critics Association meeting. He took a chair at centre stage, front — what, you expected the Donald to sit behind Ian Ziering and Leeza Gibbons? — with Lorenzo Lamas on one side and one-time Elite Model Brandi Glanville on the other, and held court.

Rivera was relegated to the back row, appropriately enough, alongside Gosselin, of Jon & Kate Plus 8 fame, and “TV personality” and former Miss USA Kenya Moore. As the old saying goes, when The Donald wanted their opinion, he gave it to them.

Twenty-five million viewers — parent network NBC’s figures — have made this season of Celebrity Apprentice, according to the booming PA system in the room, “One of the most popular seasons yet!”

Trump, sporting a dark suit and red tie so bright it was practically a klieg light. took up the thread. The Apprentice is the No. 1 show on television, he said, with finality and clarity for anyone who was hard of hearing.

Well, not really, a media analyst for an industry website tweeted. The Celebrity Apprentice actually finished behind Mike & Molly and a rerun of The Big Bang Theory in the 18-49 demo, the last time it aired.

The Donald waved his hand dismissively.

“I’m very happy with the numbers,” he said, “It’s done fantastically well.”

The Celebrity Apprentice has been edited down to hour-long episodes this season, instead of last season’s two-hour episodes.

“It’s a better show this way,” Trump asserted. “Two hours is too long. No one wants to watch an hour and 20 minutes of the cast.”

The Donald sounds off. [Angela Weiss/Getty Images]

This way, Trump still gets his face time on camera, but the others have their time cut back to where they belong. When two hour-long episodes are aired back-to-back, viewers get a double dose of Trump. This is what is known in the Trump vernacular as win-win.

It’s not his call to make, though, he insisted. Those decisions are “up to the folks at NBC. NBC’s been amazing. They’ve been tremendously supportive.”

At its core, The Celebrity Apprentice may be about raising funds for charity, but people watch for the friction. The celebrities bicker and quarrel throughout the hour and then, at the end, the Donald wades into the boardroom and lays down the law. Somebody gets fired. Trump has the last word.

He always has the last word. God help the person, celebrity or otherwise, who disputes that.

“The friction you see is for real,” Rivera said. “What you see is reality. I’ve never done a reality show,” he added, and kept a straight face.

The TV show Celebrity Apprentice is one thing, but if this were real life, Trump was asked, how long would he tolerate Rivera’s insolence?

“Geraldo’s done a good job,” Trump said. “He’s won a lot of money for his charity. I have a lot of people on Twitter and Facebook say they want me to fire him, but that isn’t because he isn’t doing well. They just don’t like the guy very much. I’m very proud of my decision. I took a lot of heat for it. I hear all the time, ‘He deserved to win, but he’s not a nice person.’ I find him a nice person.”

Trump watches “very little” of the video before the boardroom meeting.

“I don’t want to be influenced by that,” he said. “I like to see what’s going on in the boardroom. I have my advisers for that.”

The hits kept coming.

Of previous winner Arsenio Hall, Trump said: “He went from oblivion to a show back to oblivion.”

Of last week’s dismissed celebrity, NFL wide receiver Terrell Owens, Trump said he assumed Owens would be a flake, “but he could not have been better. He could not have been nicer. Honestly, he was a lot more solid person than I thought he would be. I thought he would be a flake, but he turned out to be a quality guy.”

Of the Republican Party asking him to run for state governor of New York, Trump said he was asked, “but I turned them down. I didn’t want to do it. And I’m happy with that. It’s not just the show — I have major business deals I’m doing.”

Of Bill Cosby, he said: “I don’t like (Cosby) for a lot of reasons. I have a specific reason why I don’t like him.” He wouldn’t elaborate further, though.

Joan Rivers will be seen in an upcoming episode, Trump confirmed, to help judge the remaining celebrities. The entire season was filmed early last year, and is only airing now.

“She won when she was 76 years old,” Trump said. “A lot of people forget that. She was strong. She was vibrant.”

Trump admitted the producers thought long and hard about whether the segment was appropriate, but decided in the end to air it as is.

Rivers died last September, at age 81, following complications from throat surgery. Trump visited Rivers just days before she underwent medical treatment.

“I told her at the time, she’ll be around forever. She’s unbelievable. A lot of people are going to see something on Monday night that’s really inspirational.”

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/donald-trump-holds-court-at-television-critics-association-event/feed0Brandi Glanville, Geraldo Rivera, Donald Trump, Kate GosselinalxstrachanThe Donald sounds off.Tom Cavanagh having a blast as Flash villain (with video)http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/tom-cavanagh-having-a-blast-as-flash-villain-with-video
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/tom-cavanagh-having-a-blast-as-flash-villain-with-video#commentsFri, 16 Jan 2015 21:21:36 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=578785]]>PASADENA, Calif. — Ever since The Flash first dawned last October, it was clear that Harrison Wells, the megalomaniacal president of S.T.A.R. Labs, wasn’t quite on the level. As played with a thinly veiled veneer of cynicism and arrogance by Ottawa actor Tom Cavanagh, Wells has proven to be both ethically challenged and ruthless in his pursuit of life, liberty and happiness beyond measure.

There was that little incident, for example, when — surprise! — he suddenly stood up from his wheelchair, proving to a worldwide TV audience that he wasn’t actually disabled as a result of a particle-accelerator explosion.

There was his arguably unethical removal of company CEO Simon Stagg, himself no paragon of virtue, in a case of what Wells would argue was simply justifiable homicide.

And then, in the Dec. 9 midseason finale, Wells was revealed to be “the Man in the Yellow Suit” — or, as fans of The Flash know, the killer of hard-luck superhero Barry Allen’s mother. Allen, true to the tradition of superheroes everywhere, has devoted much of his waking life to seeing that truth and justice be done, and it now appears that Wells is devoted to the exact opposite.

For Cavanagh, murder and mayhem is all in a day’s work as an actor.

Tom Cavanagh stars as Harrison Wells in The Flash.

“We say the words on the page, what we’re supposed to say,” Cavanagh said, keeping a straight face. “All of us, all the actors in the show, are getting a chance to do stuff that is fun to do. How could you not have fun? This is what we dreamt of doing when we were children. We know it’s a good job, and we’re grateful for it.”

The Flash returns Tuesday, Jan. 20, with Wells’ various misdeeds about to be laid bare for the world to see.

At first, Cavanagh refused to weigh in on the nuances of playing a villain vs. a hero.

“I think it’s dangerous when an actor starts talking about the process,” he said, keeping a straight face. “Because that can be very self-indulgent.” He paused.

“But since you asked … No, it’s a real joy to play [a villain]. Anyone who acts will tell you that when, as a character, when you have a dual purpose behind everything you say, everything you do, that duality is a joy to play for an actor, because you’re approaching everything you do from different levels. Sometimes you succeed and sometimes you don’t. A line as simple as, ‘I look forward to seeing you soon,’ becomes so much more interesting, though, because it’s layered with all this hidden meaning. He’s the Reverse Flash, but he’s also Harrison Wells.

“You always want to temper what you’re doing; you don’t want to hammer it home and make it seem like you’re this dangerous and mean character. You want to give the audience a bit of the middle ground. For me, the writing in The Flash is really clever. It sounds good to the ear, and it has a real sense of balance. It never lands too heavily on one side. People are always asking me, ‘Is he good or is he bad?’ And when they ask me that, I know we’ve accomplished our goal.”

Cavanagh forged a career as gentle, affable supporting player in his early TV roles. He appeared in Scrubs as Zach Braff’s character’s brother, then followed that in a bit part as Dog Boy in the short-lived drama, Providence. The lead role in the drama Ed followed, in which he played a gentle, lovestruck outsider who, following the breakup of his marriage, returns to the small town where he grew up.

Modern Family’s Julie Bowen played Ed’s childhood sweetheart, now a high school English teacher, who would become Ed’s long-term love interest.

At the time, playing the villain in a superhero drama seemed as unlikely as The Flash, Arrow, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Gotham all proving to be ratings hits in the same TV year.

“One of the great things about this is that for a lot of actors, for me, certainly, it’s not as if I’m besieged with opportunities all the time. That’s the actor’s life. It’s not like we get to pick and choose. You don’t know where or when the next opportunity is about to come. This is very different from the other characters I’ve played. This is my first foray into the comic-book genre. And I’ve found it’s very freeing. It’s freeing for all of us. You get to be big, you get to be small. You get to do so much, and it’s all justified. It’s fun to do.”

The Flash returns Tuesday, Jan. 20, CTV

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/tom-cavanagh-having-a-blast-as-flash-villain-with-video/feed0The FlashalxstrachanThe Flash/CWThe Flash/CW19-2 star Adrian Holmes talks ‘intense’ school shooting premierehttp://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/19-2-star-adrian-holmes-talks-intense-school-shooting-premiere
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/19-2-star-adrian-holmes-talks-intense-school-shooting-premiere#commentsFri, 16 Jan 2015 20:20:36 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=579026]]>Bravo’s elegant and tense police drama 19-2 returns for its second season Monday with a school shooting episode that was both emotionally and technically demanding to film. The premiere, titled School, contains countless casualties (most of them students) and a 13-minute single-camera tracking shot that’s a tour de force.

19-2, which is based on a French-Canadian TV series and is set in Montreal, has been praised by critics and drew an average of nearly 200,000 viewers per episode in its first season. It centres on hardened beat cop Nick Barron (Adrian Holmes) and his new partner Ben Chartier (Jared Keeso).

The push and pull between Nick and Jared ramps up this year as Ben is under pressure to find the identity of a mole at Station 19, and suspicion falls on Nick. Holmes spoke about Season 2 of 19-2, the new characters in Nick’s life and the show’s success.

Q: The show just got 10 Canadian Screen Awards nominations, but a lot of people feel like you should’ve got one for your role. What’s been your reaction?

A: I am so elated for my team. I couldn’t be happier. It really is a beautiful thing to be the lead on a show that is getting 10 nominations and being recognized the way it is. I do what I do because I love what I do. I don’t do it for the accolades. We support each other, and their win is my win. It’s going to be a great party.

Q: What was filming like for that Season 2 premiere?

A: It was very intense for all of us involved, and probably one of the hardest things I’ve had to do. At the same time, it was very rewarding to get to shoot something like that (13-minute uninterrupted shot) — getting a bit of a theatre experience on set. I got to go through all those emotions, and that real sweat. There was no scripting involved to get us sweaty. That was real sweat dripping in our eyes.

Q: The director on that episode, Podz (Daniel Grou), directed the same episode for the original French-Canadian series. Did you get a sense that he wanted to change things around the second time?

A: There are little things, little details that he didn’t get to do the first time around that he got to play with the second time around. That being said, he did such a fantastic job, there wasn’t much change needed. It was the same blocking, the same style, the same shot. But little things that only he would really know, he got to fine-tune on this go-round.

Q: Two new characters join the show this season — Nick’s cousin Kaz (Richard Chevolleau) and Kaz’s girlfriend Rita (Lisa Berry). How do they fit into Nick’s life?

A: This season, Nick is basically searching for identity and he’s got a lot of questions that he needs answered. So he goes back to his cousin Kaz, who is a criminal, but it’s the closest thing he has to family right now. He’s also hoping Kaz will help him to find out more about his father and what happened to him. It was so much fun to work with Richard, and Lisa was a delight to work with.

Adrian Holmes in the Season 2 premiere of 19-2 [Bravo/Bell]

Q: Nick has a lot of stuff going on — he’s separated from his wife, his former partner was shot. What’s been the biggest challenge of playing him?

A: Nick is so multilayered. It’s just being able to be subtle with his issues. A lot of times when you’re playing a character that comes with a lot of baggage you can overplay it and be over-the-top. But it’s about finding the right gears and tone — that’s the challenging part for me.

Q: You and Jared Keeso are longtime pals and have worked together on several projects — do you feel you’ve mastered art of hating each other on screen yet?

A: I think we’ve got that pretty down pat. This isn’t our first rodeo, so we built a level of trust and feel safe to go to places that a lot of actors have a tough time going to because they’re not sure how that actor’s going to react. He really empowers me and makes me want to be a better actor, and I feel like it’s the same for him. It’s a nice sparring session. On days off, we’ll go for drinks and enjoy the fruits of our labour.

19-2 returns with Season 2 on Jan. 19, Bravo

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/19-2-star-adrian-holmes-talks-intense-school-shooting-premiere/feed1TV 19-2mhank201219-219-2Parks and Rec fans get ready to freak out: Cones of Dunshire might become a real gamehttp://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/parks-and-rec-fans-get-ready-to-freak-out-cones-of-dunshire-might-become-a-real-game
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/parks-and-rec-fans-get-ready-to-freak-out-cones-of-dunshire-might-become-a-real-game#commentsFri, 16 Jan 2015 20:04:21 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=579058]]>If you’re a Parks and Recreation fan and you love overly complex board games that take hours to play, you’re in luck.

The same geniuses who brought us Settlers of Catan have teamed up with The Architect and Tilton and Radomski Accounting to bring you an in-real-life version of the Cones of Dunshire. But to make it a reality, they need you to chip in.

Cone Hill Games (a new subsidiary of the Catan-making Mayfair Games) have launched a Kickstarter to raise the $300,000 to make this dream a reality.

What’s the Cones of Dunshire?

Now, if you need a refresh as to what, exactly the Cones of Dunshire is, then close this post now because you are not worthy.

Just kidding. (Maybe). The Cones of Dunshire is a game invented by Ben Wyatt, a character on the NBC show played by Adam Scott and husband to Amy Poehler’s leading lady Leslie Knope. Wyatt, like Knope, is a hyper type-A who can’t sit still, so when he has a week between jobs, he comes up with the ridiculously complex Cones of Dunshire, a game that looks like Settlers had a baby with Risk and an in-real-life version of Civilization with a bit of Magic thrown in. Oh, and there’s a player called the Ledgerman who just keeps score but gets a very special hat.

We later find out the game was salvaged by the team at Tilton and Radomski Accounting, a firm that is constantly courting Wyatt only to have him move onto less nerdy workplaces.

Then, last season, we find out the firm not only saved the game but copy-righted and mass produced it. I’d link to that episode but it would cost you $1.99 to watch. In sum, Wyatt finally gets his due as The Architect of the Cones of Dunshire and fans everywhere wonder when they too can start playing.

Wait, isn’t the game giant and has anyone ever played?

Yes, yes it is giant: 10 feet by 10 feet to be exact, so some condo dwellers might not even have the space to open a full board. But that’s ok! Because there are actual tournaments where people already play the once-fictional game. It’s like the people who gather to play Quidditch, but without the awkward broom and needless physical activity.

Last year, at gaming convention Gen Con, the first non-fiction version of the game was played.

How much will it cost me?

Ok, here’s the bad news. An original, deluxe version of the game, complete with Ledgerman hat, costs $500 U.S. and it will be ready in July 2015.

That may sound like a lot for one game, but as Mayfair points out:

‘This is going to be a very small, one-time run of a giant prestige edition of the game, with disparate pieces, from a licensed property, for a niche audience. We think there exist a few hundred people who desire such a collector’s item, and we’ve provided a few cheaper items for folks that want more modest souvenirs of the show. This is why we went Kickstarter: to quickly gauge the actual interest for an expensive deluxe version similar to what you see on the show. This game will NOT be sold through any our normal channels; backers will receive it and there will be no more.”

Isn’t this copyright infringement?

No. The production company behind Parks and Rec, Open 4 Business Productions, is 100 per cent on board, as are Scott and Poehler, so the actual game will be as awesome as the writers intended.

PASADENA, Calif. — When no fewer than 16 actors and producers took the stage at the winter meeting of the Television Critics Association, no one mentioned that the hit superhero series Arrow and The Flash are filmed in Vancouver, but they didn’t have to, really.

From Toronto native Stephen Amell, who plays reclusive billionaire Oliver Queen and superhero Green Arrow on Arrow, to his cousin Robbie Amell, who plays Ronnie Raymond, the younger half of the crime-fighting entity Firestorm on The Flash, a virtual galaxy of Canadian actors and actresses play key roles in both series, as heroes and villains alike.

Ottawa native Tom Cavanagh plays The Flash’s duplicitous Dr. Harrison Wells, who, as the Reverse Flash — a.k.a. the Man in the Yellow Suit — murdered reluctant hero Barry Allen’s mother. London, Ont. native Victor Garber plays The Flash’s brilliant but arrogant nuclear physicist Dr. Martin Stein, the older half of the crime-fighting entity Firestorm. In the DC Comics version, Dr. Stein sacrifices everything, even his marriage, in his study of transmutation. After he discovers that a particle accelerator has fused him with the younger, impulsive Ronnie Raymond, he races to find a way to separate the two before it’s too late.

The Flash returns with new episodes Jan. 20; Arrow returns the following night, on Jan. 21.

Grant Gustin portrays Barry Allen, aka The Flash. Diyah Pera/The CW

Arrow and The Flash have joined Gotham, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Agent Carter and the upcoming Marvel’s Daredevil on a growing roster of superhero dramas based on comic books.
Gotham, The Shield, Arrow and The Flash have all touched a nerve with the popular public. In a sign of the times perhaps, comic book adaptations seem impervious to the whim of falling ratings and capricious studio executives.

Greg Berlanti, a writer-producer who helped create the earthbound coming-of-age dramas Dawson’s Creek and Everwood and the prime time ensemble drama Brothers & Sisters before turning to sci-fi and superheroes, said he never thought of Arrow, which he conceived in 2012 with fellow writer-producers Marc Guggenheim and Andrew Kreisberg, as being a superhero or sci-fi drama.

“I know it’s probably hard to believe, but we get most excited when we’re in the writer’s room thinking of ways to work with these actors and create stories that are about character. And not just these actors, either, but the people who are up in Canada right now. It’s no different, from my point of view, whether it’s a family show or a teen drama. It feels the same. I really don’t think of Arrow or The Flash as superhero shows, or genre shows. It’s getting at the heart of the story, who we’re following and why we should care about their well-being, and doing it in such a way that it’s vibrant and interesting and doesn’t just sit there.”

Arrow and The Flash’s brain trust also feels a special responsibility to the stunt team, builders, designers, costume artists and crew technicians in Vancouver who help bring the shows to life.
The truth is that only 10 years ago, conceiving worlds as intricate and complex as those depicted in Arrow and The Flash would have been impossible on a TV budget, Kreisberg said. Emerging technology, breakthroughs in computer-generated graphics and one of the most innovative, hard-working creative crews Kreisberg has worked with have helped bring the impossible to life.

“We couldn’t have imagined doing Flash a few years ago, and certainly not Arrow,” he said. “Arrow is a much more stunt-driven show, but we’re lucky to have the most amazing stunt teams on both shows. Every episode that comes along, we’re basically reinventing the wheel. We’re constantly having to come up with new and different ways to do things. You look at other genre superhero shows that are coming out, like Gotham and S.H.I.E.L.D., and they’re all raising the bar for what you can do on television.

We always said that at any given time you can flip on the TV and The Dark Knight is on, Iron Man’s on, and you have to compete with that,” Kreisberg added. “One thing TV can do really well, obviously, is get deeper into the emotional lives of the characters, and so if you were to ask me the real reason why they’re touching so many people in the audience, I would say that’s it. It’s no longer just about story arcs. TV gets you deeper into the characters.

“But if you’re not keeping up with the effects, with the breakthroughs in technology, character can get lost. When things go wrong, which they can and do, you need a crew and a creative team on the ground that really knows what it’s doing. Which we have.

He knows you wouldn’t give it to him even if he asked — which he won’t — because that’s not how TV works. Wilmore may be a respected political satirist, writer, producer, media critic, actor and a recurring contributor on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show — as the Daily Show’s “senior black correspondent” — but he’s not Stephen Colbert. And there’s no point in pretending he is.

Wilmore takes over as host of the new Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore in the time period vacated by the recently departed Colbert Report, starting Monday, on Comedy Central in the U.S. and the Comedy Network in Canada.

Wilmore’s focuses on the divisive issue of race in America — Wilmore himself is African-American, and grew up in a sprawling suburb of urban Los Angeles — but that’s not the only reason he can’t replicate the cultlike aura of Colbert.

Humour is subjective. Every late-night comedian has to establish his own identity, and that takes time. Some win over the audience, and some don’t. That’s just the nature of the game.

Wilmore may face a hopeless task when compared with Colbert — at least in the short term — but there is precedent for success. Another recurring player on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, John Oliver, has found success of a kind as host of HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, the late-night comedy talk show which promises, as the ads say, “Breaking news on a weekly basis!”

Larry Wilmore

As with The Colbert Report, The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore will air four times a week, directly after The Daily Show.

Wilmore knows that as long as he can make people laugh, he’ll be fine. Colbert did more than that, of course, but laughter is always a good start.

It’s no accident, for example, that The Nightly Show will begin on Martin Luther King Day.

“I had a dream that a brother needed to work on that day,” Wilmore said, deadpan. “So … yes, irony intended, completely.”

Wilmore said he was given the option of starting on the Monday or Tuesday, but when he learned The Daily Show would air Monday, it became a no-brainer.

“I thought, let’s just start the week off.”

The news is not always a laughing matter, of course, or even ripe for satire. The Nightly Show’s final live-air rehearsals coincided with breaking news of the Charlie Hebdo rampage in Paris.

Larry Wilmore

“I think we were all affected,” Wilmore said quietly. “We talked to Jon that day, and his whole office was numb from that. Not every topic is going to be a laugh-generating topic. You just have to judge which ones you’re going to highlight that day, and which are going to be more ripe for discussion later on when a new angle comes up that allows you to have more of a comic take. The timing of that is a bit scary but I’ll tell you, man, I give those guys in France a lot of credit. I mean, the type of courage it takes to do that. One of the guys had a bodyguard for a couple of years, right? So he knew how much his life was in danger. We can’t relate, I don’t think, in this country to the type of thing they’re facing. There are so many issues, though. I don’t think we’ll have to worry about running out of material on this show, as far as that’s concerned.

“My only opinion about that is that they’re starting to kill satirists just as a brother is about to launch his show. So …”

Titles are hard, Wilmore acknowledged. At one point, he considered calling it The Minority Report, but then learned the Fox network was working on a series remake of the 2002 Steven Spielberg film Minority Report.

He thought specifying it as The Minority Report with Larry Wilmore would work, but it was too long and awkward a title to fit on hats.

“Nightly, to me is kind of a sly joke. I’m just using my joke brain. If you’re watching The Daily Show, and it feels like it’s getting a little darker, you’re probably watching The Nightly Show.”

Each episode will begin with Wilmore weighing in on the news of the day, Stewart-like, followed by a panel discussion of those same events, much like satirist comedian Bill Maher’s early program Politically Incorrect.

“We’ll deconstruct the events of the day, and get into it. There’ll be a lot of surprising elements. It may be comic. It may be provocative. Who knows? It’ll go wherever it goes.”

And whatever happens will happen.

The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore premières Monday, Jan. 19, on Comedy Network

Then last weekend in front of a live TV audience in the millions, she won a Golden Globe for best actress in a television series, musical or comedy, for Jane the Virgin.

The 30-year-old Chicago native who once vowed to become the Latino Meryl Streep hasn’t arrived exactly, but Jane the Virgin has already proved to be a strange journey.

After that earlier job fell through, she was at a loss. Her agent emailed her a script, Jane the Virgin, loosely adapted from the wildly popular Venezuelan telenovela Juana le Virgen, about a young woman who is artificially inseminated by accident during a routine checkup at a fertility clinic. Rodriguez’s first impression, based on the title, was WTF? Five screens in, she was hooked.

Jane the Virgin, co-created by Rodriguez’s new soul sister, Jennie Snyder Urman, was both a gentle and wise depiction of Hispanic life in the U.S. This was not your typical prime-time drama about Latinos as drug dealers and borderline hysterics but something more honest and true.

Justin Baldoni, left, and Gina Rodriguez in Jane the Virgin

Jane the Virgin has been one of the few TV hits this season. It airs on CW in the U.S. and is widely available in Canada on the new streaming service Shomi.

Rodriguez is grounded and philosophical about so-called “overnight” success.

It was hardly overnight. She plays 23 in Jane the Virgin, but she’s older. Before Jane the Virgin, her claim to fame was 17 episodes in The Bold and the Beautiful, a couple of episodes in the original Law & Order, and a semi-recurring role in Army Wives.

“A few years ago I did a film that went to Sundance” — the Edward James Olmos-produced Filly Brown — “and it was an awesome success. I was, like, oh, yeah, I’m at Sundance. I’m going to be Jennifer Lawrence. I’m going to be a superhero tomorrow. And it didn’t happen.

“My life didn’t look the way I thought it would. My favourite saying is if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.

Justin Baldoni, left, and Gina Rodriguez in Jane the Virgin

“In this industry, you can get caught up as an actress. You can get caught up in the ‘Yes, yes, whatever you want,’ and nobody holding you accountable anymore.

“I really thank God for the bad experiences helping me realize the kind of woman I want to be, while I’m an actor.”

Rodriguez realized early on, while reading Urman’s scripts, that they thought alike. When together, they finish each other’s sentences. Privately, Rodriguez marvels at how Urman has captured being a young Latina in a largely white, middle-class culture.

“It’s awesome to be able to play a character I would want my daughter to look up to. I don’t think there’s any one right way to live your life.

“I think taking care of yourself and protecting yourself and making the right decisions is what it’s all about.

Gina Rodriguez, left, and Justin Baldoni in Jane the Virgin

“I’m not saying everyone should be a virgin until they get married. The show isn’t really about that, anyway; it’s about her.

“I think Jane is really awesome to look up to. She’s strong, she’s confident, she’s not afraid to say no, she sticks up for her decisions.

“She’s not a saint. She’s trying to keep her frustration inside herself, just like anybody else would in that situation. With the images we see everywhere nowadays, it’s nice to have someone who brightens it up once in a while. Jane is that somebody.

“I would definitely hang out with her and I kind of wish I was more like her. I feel blessed to be part of a project that I believe in and that other people are digging.

“As an actor, you never know what’s going to happen. There’s just so much that’s out of your control. You just do the best that you can and then you walk away. You have no control over anything but your performance.

‘She’s strong, she’s confident, she’s not afraid to say no, she sticks up for her decisions.’

“To be able to let go and know that you’re in trustworthy hands — I mean, I just love Jane. I thank God we got 22 episodes. I’m going to give it my all. This is awesome. I love being a virgin again.”

Rodriguez may be only just out of her 20s, but she’s wise enough to know it will end one day.

“I know in my soul the posters will come down one day,” she said quietly. “Jane, I love her and I want to be with her for life, but she will end. I think the best way to prepare for the future is to embrace and appreciate the present. So every day I wake up thanking God for Jennie and Jane and my cast and being able to do what I love. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t. It’s all so surreal. It’s like that moment you’ve thought about since you were a kid. So, really enjoy it. The best way to celebrate a miracle is to fall in love with it, and I’m in love with Jane, so thank you.”

Jane the Virgin airs on Shomi; Mondays, The CW

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/golden-globe-winner-gina-rodriguez-grateful-for-jane-the-virgin-with-video/feed0Jane the VirginalxstrachanJane the Virgin/The CWJane the Virgin/The CWJane the Virgin/The CWPatricia Arquette tackles cybercrime in newest CSI spinoffhttp://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/patricia-arquette-tackles-cybercrime-in-newest-csi-spinoff
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/patricia-arquette-tackles-cybercrime-in-newest-csi-spinoff#commentsWed, 14 Jan 2015 16:56:47 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=577442]]>BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Patricia Arquette had just won the 2015 Golden Globe for supporting actress in a motion picture, for playing hard-luck single mom Olivia Evans in Boyhood.

If anyone seems poised to turn her back on TV, especially after playing psychic Allison Dubois in the 2005-’11 thriller Medium, it’s Arquette.

And yet, as she says of her soon-to-debut TV procedural CSI: Cyber, it would be a mistake to assume Boyhood is representative of today’s film industry.

The truth is that TV remains the only real home for female actors who want to play more than just the wife or girlfriend, Arquette said.

As a young mother herself, she didn’t relish the idea of going back to 16-hour days and six-day work weeks, but CSI: Cyber seemed too good an opportunity to pass up.

There are precious few police procedurals today where a woman plays the lead, Arquette reasoned.

“The movie business has changed a lot in the last 10 years,” she said.

Patricia Arquette

“And frankly there are a lot of incredible actresses who are not making a living and are really struggling. I’ve always loved doing small art movies for art’s sake.

“But I’ve also always really liked the idea of network television, which is basically free. You have to watch commercials, but it’s free.

“It’s entertainment for everyone. I’m a fourth-generation actor. My great grandparents were in vaudeville, which was basically like network TV. It was five cents a show. I really love the idea.

“I felt there was this real elitism towards television that I wanted to go against.

“I’ve seen a lot of people not work because their ego stood in the way. They get hung up on how good the material should be and what’s proper for somebody of their celebrity status, and after a while no one hires them.

“The truth is, movies today are paying very few people enough to survive. I like the idea of reaching a worldwide audience. I like the idea of being in someone’s apartment in Dubai, someone’s shack in Mexico, all over the world.

Patricia Arquette stars in CSI: Cyber

“I’ve worked on aid projects all over the world and it’s amazing how many people can watch television.

“So I feel incredibly grateful for these opportunities when they come. I want to be a part of forgetting their troubles, if only for a moment. And television lets me do that.”

CSI: Cyber solves crimes executed in cyberspace, everything from identity theft to stalking and bullying. Just 10 years ago, a police procedural based on computer crimes would have seemed preposterous.

“Medium and CSI: Cyber are very different procedurals,” Arquette said. “Medium was very heart-based. This is more psychological. In Medium, she was driven by her instinct, a second sight. This character is much more brain-based.

“It’s not often that you have female leads in procedurals, and I think that’s exciting to see, frankly. I think it makes sense. Women are smart.”

Boyhood’s emergence into the limelight following its debut at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, coupled with a near sweep at last weekend’s Golden Globes, has inevitably prompted talk of Oscars.

“The weird thing is I’m 46,” she said. “I have been in this business for so long. People loved this little movie I did when I was younger, called True Romance. It was a box office bomb.

“Other movies I’ve been in — Lost Highway with David Lynch — they were interesting, but nobody cared about them. So I really didn’t think anything was going to happen at this moment in my life.

“It’s lovely to have so much attention paid to a project that you’re a part of. With Boyhood, we all feel like we made this together and however we can support this movie and support each other, it’s all for the good.

“It’s a celebration of all of us and 400-person crew and everyone who showed up over the course of 12 years. I cannot tell you how proud I am of Boyhood, and how privileged I feel to have been a part of it.”

CSI: Cyber premieres March 4, CTV, CBS

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/patricia-arquette-tackles-cybercrime-in-newest-csi-spinoff/feed0Patricia ArquettealxstrachanCSI: CYBERCSI: Cyber/CBSBoyhoodJames Corden preps to take over The Late Late Showhttp://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/james-corden-preps-to-take-over-the-late-late-show
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/james-corden-preps-to-take-over-the-late-late-show#commentsTue, 13 Jan 2015 20:41:57 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=576833]]>PASADENA, Calif. — He was named to the Queen’s List earlier this month. He appeared in the ITV drama Fat Friends and earned the 2000 Royal Television Society Award for “newcomer on screen.” He starred in his own series, Gavin & Stacey, for BBC Three, and won a 2008 BAFTA Award for best male comedy performance. He guest hosted a U.K. TV show called Big Brother’s Big Mouth, played the lead in the 2009 film Lesbian Vampire Killers — not exactly Academy Award material — then moved to Broadway as the lead in the unlikely hit play One Man. Two Guvnors.

All in all, it’s been quite a ride — but just try telling that to a North American TV audience unfamiliar with BAFTA Awards, the Queen’s List or Fat Friends.

And yet, that’s exactly the audience James Corden must win over if he’s to adequately fill the shoes when he takes over from Craig Ferguson as host of The Late Late Show in March.

CBS named Corden as Ferguson’s replacement three months ago, but when Corden, still looking a tad dazed and confused from the trans-Atlantic relocation, appeared this week at the winter meeting of the Television Critics Association, the feeling in the room was — James Who?

If the trick to winning over a late-night TV audience is making ’em laugh, though, Corden may have the battle half won. The 36-year-old London-born comedian took a room full of sleep-deprived, caffeinated cynics and, one by one, won them over with his non-stop verbal assault of wit, gentle self deprecation and wide-eyed enthusiasm for a medium in which David Letterman, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are the greats.

James Cordon speaks on a panel at the Television Critics Association press tour

“There’s nothing more creative I think I’ll ever do in my career than try to make an hour of television every day,” Corden said.

Corden would rather appear on TV than work in the movies — his most recent role was in Into the Woods, in which he played the Baker — but not every film experience is like Into the Woods, he said.

“Most of the time, you’re sat in a trailer on a parking lot on a very low plastic toilet that you flush by using your foot. That’s it. That’s most of your day.”

Hosting a TV show has its privileges — a slightly higher toilet, for one, and porcelain at that — but there’s pressure, too.

“It’s daunting,” Corden admitted. “Don’t get me wrong, while looking at the sign there with my name on it, it’s enough to make me throw up on myself.”

Even so, Corden already has his first guests lined up in his head.

“Our first musical guest is going to be Barack Obama. Singing a big song. No, we don’t know. We literally know nothing about what we’re going to do. It’s completely pointless, our being here. We should be at work figuring out what the show is, instead of telling you that we don’t know what the show is.”

James Cordon speaks about hosting The Late Late Show

Corden took the Queen’s List in stride.

“Your first thought when you receive a letter like that is you’re painfully aware there are so many more people who deserve it more than you,” he said. “My parents were so proud. They made huge sacrifices for me to be able to do this. My mom cried. And my dad laughed and said, ‘You know what OBE stands for, don’t you? Other Blokes’ Efforts.’ Which is typical of him. I’m incredibly honoured. You never think you’ll be recognized in such a way by your own country.”

Corden is only too well aware of the cultural legacy of late-night talk shows in America.

“I’ve been watching quite a bit of David Letterman’s 12:30 show, when he started, and it’s jaw-dropping how good it is. It’s incredible how great he is.

“The same with Jay Leno. I don’t think I’ve seen monologues like that — it’s incredible. Craig Ferguson’s interviews are some of the most organic and off-the-cuff and brilliantly judged moments I’ve seen. Jimmy Fallon’s enthusiasm, this absolute core of enthusiasm — it’s incredible. I said to him, when I spent some time with him in New York, ‘Your show is the very thing that inspires me and terrifies me at the same time, because when I watch The Tonight Show, my fear is we’ll never be able to do something like this.’ I think he’s brilliant.

“For me, it’s simply a matter of trying to find out what the show is and hope we can find the right tone and find an audience that says, This is the guy we want to be with for this hour of time.’ I’d love to make a warm show that’s funny.”

He paused, momentarily lost in reflection.

“It’s weird, you know. Coming from Britain, if you’re making a movie, if you’re making a TV show, people say, ‘Oh, I wonder if this will work in America.’ But no one in America is ever going, ‘I wonder if this will work in the United Kingdom’.”

The Late Late Show with James Corden premières March 23 on CBS

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/james-corden-preps-to-take-over-the-late-late-show/feed0The Late Late ShowalxstrachanGetty ImagesJames Cordon/Getty ImagesDegrassi marks 35th anniversary, creator ‘grateful’ for longevity (with video)http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/degrassi-marks-35th-anniversary-creator-grateful-for-longevity-with-video
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/degrassi-marks-35th-anniversary-creator-grateful-for-longevity-with-video#commentsTue, 13 Jan 2015 17:27:28 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=576943]]>Linda Schuyler has found the fountain of youth programming. Blithe, unassuming and quick to laugh, the co-creator of the Degrassi TV franchise has the pep of a cheerleader and the perception of a yearbook editor. Though in her 60s, the former elementary school teacher is well versed in teen angst and excitement.

The franchise recently marked the 35th anniversary of The Kids of Degrassi Street, the CBC series that begat Degrassi Junior High, which begat Degrassi High, which begat Degrassi: The Next Generation, which is now simply called Degrassi. The newest incarnation wraps its 14th season on MTV tonight.

“It really is all about keeping the youth energy alive in this company, and that comes basically from two facets: the young performers that we hire and the writers that we hire,” explains Schuyler, noting that Degrassi writers are typically in their late 20s or early 30s.

“Over the years, I’ve been quite a stickler for hiring actors that are age-appropriate, within a couple of years. There’s such an intangible benefit to that because you catch them at the age that they’re actually playing and we capture all their vulnerabilities and insecurities, and it’s not like they’re too slick or composed.”

Many of Degrassi’s peers have portrayed just the opposite, the aspirational instead of the actual, and have attracted their share of viewers for the effort.

In the late 1980s, Saved by the Bell’s bug-eyed kitsch enamoured a generation of fans and proved there was a profitable market for tweens. Series like Beverly Hills, 90210, Dawson’s Creek, The O.C., Gossip Girl and Pretty Little Liars followed, working the soap-opera format like a burger-flipper in a fast-food joint.

Amanda Stepto, left, as Spike, and Cathy Keenan as Liz on an early Degrassi episode [PNG]

Beverly Hills, 90210 in particular drew criticism for casting actors in their mid-20s, and Dawson’s Creek was chided for its dissertation-level dialogue. If those shows play like precocious sophomores padding their chests with Kleenex, Degrassi is the endearingly awkward younger sister.

The show’s most recent storylines involve the student council vice-president learning she’s pregnant and cheerleaders raising funds by posing topless online. Previous stories have tackled school shootings, cutting, homosexuality, drug use, date rape and a gonorrhea outbreak, among other things.

“I really enjoy a lot of those other shows, but I think Degrassi has taken a slightly different approach. I think there’s an authenticity to our storytelling — and you’ll notice I won’t use the word ‘realism’,” says Schuyler.

“I use the word ‘authenticity’ because I think we have an emotional authenticity to our storylines that really taps into that adolescent teenage experience when you’ve got one foot in childhood and one foot in adulthood, and that push and pull between.”

The strategy has paid off. Degrassi has won almost 100 awards, including two International Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award. Celebrity fans include Kevin Smith, Ellen Page, Sarah Silverman, Lena Dunham and Quentin Tarantino, and they laud the show for its relatability.

“We try to acknowledge that these scenarios exist for teenagers, but we’re not trying to make them ripped-from-the-headlines or be sensationalism. On the other hand we don’t want to trivialize or pretend it’s not really anything,” Schuyler says.

Born in London, England, Schuyler moved to Canada with her family early on. She recalls her youth with a hearty laugh.

“Oh, god! That’s ancient history! I was a British immigrant and I grew up trying very hard trying to hide my British accent and correct my vocabulary so I would talk proper Canadian-ese. And when I started teaching in an inner-city school in Toronto, I looked at my class, who were so diverse.

“I thought as a teenager I had it tough because I spoke with a different accent and different vocabulary. Yet here are these kids with different skin colours, religions, cultures, languages spoken at home. If I had trouble as a white kid speaking English, how did these kids cope?”

Drake and the Degrassi gang. []

In 1976, Schuyler and Kit Hood founded Playing With Time Inc., which produced The Kids of Degrassi Street, Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High for CBC. After they parted ways in the early 1990s, Schuyler founded Epitome Pictures, which has also produced Instant Star and The L.A. Complex. She wed her producing partner, Stephen Stohn, in 1995.

Schuyler’s emphasis on true-to-life stories has admittedly rankled critics over the years. Episodes in 1989 and 2004 sparked controversy in the U.S. when two characters decided to have abortions, and in 2011 the Florida Family Association called for a boycott following storylines about a gay quarterback and a transgender teen.

“The concern over the abortion episodes happened to us with American broadcasters, not Canadian broadcasters. Apart from that, I wouldn’t say I’ve experienced any other censorship per se,” says Schuyler, a member of the Order of Canada.

“But there have certainly been some disgruntled viewers, and it goes all the way back to the opening credits — I think it was in Degrassi High — where we have a black guy kissing a white girl. I got lots of mail, particularly from the southern states, that said that was completely inappropriate.

“Even though we’ve had that kind of response, the positive response — which says ‘thank you for showing me a slice of my life, thank you for showing me that I’m not alone’ — is the kind of feedback that far outweighs it.”

Linda Schuyler is a co-creator of the Degrassi franchise [Epitome Pictures]

The push for relatability also results in a high cast turnover rate. Hundreds of actors have appeared on the Degrassi shows over the years, and high-school graduations often usher them out.

“We have to be very bold about allowing our favourite characters to graduate from the show. We’re constantly graduating out a favourite tranche, and there are all kinds of tears around here because we’re losing beloved characters and actors. But then the door opens for a whole new tranche to come in,” says Schuyler.

“I take the show year by year. We’re in a business that never has any long-term contract. Even through Degrassi is going into Season 15 this year, it only ever gets ordered one year at a time so every year we get reordered it’s like a gift.

“I’m so grateful to be able to put transgender storylines, abortion storylines and same-sex storylines out there. But I’m also thrilled to be able to tell the wacky little stories about first dates and proms gone wrong, because it’s all part of the teenage experience.”

Degrassi airs its Season 14 finale Tuesday, Jan. 13, on MTV

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/degrassi-marks-35th-anniversary-creator-grateful-for-longevity-with-video/feed0Linda Schuylermhank2012Degrassi Junior HighDegrassi: The Next GenerationDrake and the Degrassi gang.Linda SchuylerEugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara together again in Schitt’s Creek (with video)http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/eugene-levy-catherine-ohara-together-again-in-schitts-creek-with-video
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/eugene-levy-catherine-ohara-together-again-in-schitts-creek-with-video#commentsTue, 13 Jan 2015 16:44:36 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=576176]]>PASADENA, Calif. — Eugene Levy famously parodied TV luminaries Milton Berle, Ricardo Montalban and Gene Shalit during his years on SCTV, even as Catherine O’Hara famously channelled Mary Tyler Moore, Morgan Fairchild, Lucille Ball, Maggie Smith and Tammy Faye Bakker, among others. So there was not much the new Hollywood could throw at them that would tip them off-balance when they met the U.S. press this past weekend, in anticipation of the launch of their new comedy, Schitt’s Creek.

Schitt’s Creek, which debuts with back-to-back episodes Jan. 13, on CBC, recently premiered on the rebranded POP cable channel in the U.S. Not so long ago, POP was called the TV Guide Network, but in a twist that Levy and O’Hara’s SCTV characters would have appreciated, the TV Guide brand has gone the way of Texaco Star Theater and Quasar TV’s works in a drawer.

As reporters faced them quizzically — what’s with the title? Is Schitt’s Creek, like, a real place in the Yukon Territory, or is it a suburb in Detroit? — Levy, looking debonair in neatly tailored slacks, jacket and tie, and O’Hara, looking flamboyant and très chic in an open-necked black blouse and stylish black boots, took it all in stride.

Those hoping for an impromptu comedy routine would have been disappointed: Levy was low-key and philosophical, while O’Hara was on her best behaviour, allowing herself just the occasional sideways glance and can-you-believe-I-just-said-that grin.

Schitt’s Creek, created by Levy with his son, Dan, stars the elder Levy as Johnny and O’Hara as former soap star, Moira Rose, a once wealthy couple — they made their money on a video store chain that went bust over VHS rentals — now forced to live in the small town they bought as a joke. Life was good to them once, and they’re determined to make it good again, no matter who they have to wind up, rewind and throw away in the process.

“It’s anywhere,” Dan Levy, who conceived the idea, said. “The reason we did that was to make it accessible for everyone.”

Schitt’s Creek alternated production between Toronto’s Pinewood Studios and a small town in Ontario called Goodwood.

“You don’t know where it is,” Eugene Levy explained. “We never really say. It’s a small town, but we’re not making a joke of it being a small town. The only thing we’re making fun of is perhaps our family that lost their money and now they have to live in this town they once bought as a joke. And now the joke has backfired on them. This is the only place they can afford to live.”

It’s not cruel, or meant to be mean-spirited, Levy insisted

“There’s something charming about it,” he said. “We tried to bring out a kind of small-town charm with real, tangible people who are living there. We are the joke in the show, not so much the town.”

Levy told the room it’s easy to stay in character when working with one of the greats.

“There’s only one Catherine O’Hara,” he said. “Catherine has an amazing ability to immerse herself in characters and find that character’s funny bone. She’s quite chameleon-like in terms of how deeply she finds the character. And not just the character. She just has that knack of finding the funny moments that make that character funny without trying to be funny.”

“That’s enough, thank you,” O’Hara said, sitting right beside him.

Eugene Levy stars in Schitt’s Creek

Later, on her own, with a pair of visiting reporters from Canada, O’Hara talked about what she herself thinks is funny, and what she chooses to watch at home when nobody’s eavesdropping.

Louie, she said. Kids in the Hall. Modern Family, despite the backlash.

“It’s hard to watch something do that well for a long period of time … apparently,” she said, with a wry roll of the eyes. “Laughter itself hasn’t changed. The content has changed. Satire has changed, because of The Daily Show and Jon Stewart and people like him — it’s deeper now, more cutting, more focused on contemporary issues — but people still laugh at the same things.

“Whatever touches us as a human being and makes us laugh — there’s something elemental and universal about that, and it never changes.”

Schitt’s Creek premières Tuesday, Jan. 13, on CBC

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/eugene-levy-catherine-ohara-together-again-in-schitts-creek-with-video/feed0Schitt's CreekalxstrachanSchitt's Creek/CBCSchitt's Creek/CBCAuthor Lawrence Hill introduces Book of Negroes to U.S. audience (with video)http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/author-lawrence-hill-introduces-book-of-negroes-to-u-s-audience-with-video
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/author-lawrence-hill-introduces-book-of-negroes-to-u-s-audience-with-video#commentsTue, 13 Jan 2015 16:27:11 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=576151]]>“Survival ain’t pretty. You have to do what you have to do when you have to do it.” — Aunjanue Ellis as Aminata Diallo in The Book of Negroes

PASADENA, Calif. — In introducing The Book of Negroes novelist Lawrence Hill, filmmaker Clement Virgo, producer Damon D’Oliveira and actors Aunjanue Ellis, Lyriq Bent, Louis Gossett, Jr. and Cuba Gooding Jr. at the winter meeting of the Television Critics Association, BET Networks president Charlie Jordan Brookins gave a shout-out to “our friends at eOne” for helping put the miniseries together, but somehow neglected to mention CBC.

Not that anyone at CBC is likely to complain — The Book of Negroes premiered last week to a Canadian audience of 1.7 million viewers, the kind of numbers that dwarf many NHL regular season games — but the handful of CBC executives in the room could be forgiven for feeling at least a twinge of annoyance that, once again, an American cable network was taking credit for a miniseries that won’t even air in the U.S. until next month.

Virgo based his miniseries adaptation on the novel by Hill, also Canadian, about a young girl, Aminata Diallo, kidnapped by slave traders in West Africa and sold to wealthy landowners in South Carolina. The novel follows Diallo’s harrowing escape during the American Revolutionary War and her eventual resettlement in Nova Scotia, her name entered into the Book of Negroes — a real-life historical record of the names of freed African-American slaves who petitioned England for resettlement in the northern colonies.

“I grew up with a foot in both countries, Canada and the States, having an African-American father and a white American mother who moved to Canada,” Hill explained. “And I learned growing up as a child in Toronto that the first form of literature produced widely and published widely by African-Americans and African-Canadians is a slave narrative. And very few of the famous ones were written by women.

Aunjanue Ellis in The Book of Negroes

“I wanted a women’s story. I wanted to privilege a woman’s story. She’s not just a slave. She’s a woman. She catches babies. She has a lover. She has children whom she loses. She has parents. She’s literate. I wanted to step deeply into her life and portray a woman moving in and out of slavery in the 18th century.”

Hill was closely involved in the making of the miniseries. He wanted it to be more than a revisionist, updated-for-modern-day remake of the miniseries of yesteryear — a Roots redux. And thanks to Virgo, Ellis and Canadian child actor Shailyn Pierre-Dixon, who plays Diallo as a wide-eyed but resilient 11-year-old, he believes he succeeded.

“I don’t think there’s any exploitation — I hope not — in either the book or the miniseries. It’s certainly a painful history, but one of the things that strikes me about the worst moments of human history — whether it’s the slave trade, the Holocaust, the Rwanda genocide, the war in the former Yugoslavia, you name it — is how many millions of people have survived not only physically, which is miraculous, but wanted to go on, wanted to live and love and give to each other and to other people.

“I was inspired by that resilience to write the story of Aminata, and show a woman persevering. So many of us have ancestors, neighbours and friends who have suffered the most atrocious insults to their humanity. Really, at their core, the miniseries and the novel are meditations on the profundity of human resilience.

Clement Virgo on the set of The Book of Negroes

“I was delighted to see Aunjanue embody that spirit so beautifully in the miniseries.”

Toward the end of the session, producer D’Oliveira made a point of mentioning the miniseries’ Canadian broadcast partner.

“We have Canada’s public broadcaster, the CBC, working with America’s black network, BET, for the first time. That’s pretty landmark. I do think they were probably the only reason we were able to make this. I think BET is probably the only network that could make the show Book of Negroes in America. That’s how we got this made. Our first episode in Canada — I mean, 1.68 million people watching it on a Wednesday night last week. That in itself is an incredible result for Canadian dramatic television. We’re really thrilled about that. We feel like we’ve reached our audience already.”

The Book of Negroes airs Wednesdays on CBC

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/author-lawrence-hill-introduces-book-of-negroes-to-u-s-audience-with-video/feed0The Book Of NegroesalxstrachanThe Book Of Negroes/CBCThe Book Of Negroes/CBCLate Show with Stephen Colbert gets premiere date (with video)http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/late-show-with-stephen-colbert-gets-premiere-date-with-video
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/late-show-with-stephen-colbert-gets-premiere-date-with-video#commentsTue, 13 Jan 2015 16:01:57 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=576488]]>PASADENA, Calif. — The Late Show with Stephen Colbert has a premiere date: Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2015.

CBS Entertainment president Nina Tassler, made the announcement Monday at the winter meeting of the Television Critics Association.

Tassler said CBS is talking to David Letterman about possible fill-in programming between the time Letterman retires in May and Colbert takes over in September, but she did not elaborate.

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert will air in Canada on the Rogers-owned City group of stations.

In other news, Tassler announced second-season renewals for the 2015-16 season for Madam Secretary, NCIS: New Orleans and Scorpion. There was no word on the fate of Stalker. Broadcast networks often wait until May before revealing their renewal and cancellation plans, but CBS has had strong year in the ratings and is comfortable making decisions early.

Madam Secretary and NCIS: New Orleans air in Canada on Global; Scorpion airs on Citytv.

Asked if she was at all concerned by the fall in ratings that occurred from The Amazing Race’s move to lightly viewed Fridays from the anchor night of Sundays, Tassler noted that Amazing Race appeals to an affluent, upscale viewing audience and picks up significantly once online streaming is factored into the overall equation.

The Amazing Race is exceedingly popular in Canada, where it is consistently one of CTV’s most-watched programs of the week. The reality show is much more popular in Canada than it is in the U.S., relative to the size of the two countries’ populations.

Tassler said she will stay with both a fall edition and a spring edition for now, as CBS does with Survivor, in part, because followers of high-end reality programs, such as Survivor and Amazing Race, have shown they expect consistency in programming.

The Amazing Race is one of the best-produced reality programs on television, which is why it has won so many Emmys, Tassler suggested. Showrunner Bertram van Munster has managed to keep The Amazing Race fresh and original, Tassler said, and she’s in frequent consultations to make sure it stays that way.

Asked if rumours were true that Charlie Sheen might return to the finale of Two and a Half Men, Tassler would only say that she’s leaving all decisions in the hands of Two and a Half Men’s executive producer and co-creator Chuck Lorre.

“I can promise you a lot of surprises,” she said cagily, but would not confirm nor deny speculation about Sheen.

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/late-show-with-stephen-colbert-gets-premiere-date-with-video/feed0The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon - Season 1alxstrachanMadam SecretaryTatiana Maslany finally finds the funny on Orphan Black (with video)http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/tatiana-maslany-finally-finds-the-funny-on-orphan-black-with-video
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/tatiana-maslany-finally-finds-the-funny-on-orphan-black-with-video#commentsMon, 12 Jan 2015 03:19:41 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=576162]]>PASADENA, Calif. — It took the better part of three years but Tatiana Maslany has finally reached the point on Orphan Black where she can allow herself the occasional moment to kick back, relax and even have a laugh.

Playing multiple versions of the same character on a conspiratorial thriller about clones run amok demanded an almost laserlike intensity and concentration at first. Finally, though, after putting different voices, personality traits and character motivations to Sarah, Alison, Cosima, Helena, Rachel, Katja, Janika, Aryanna, Danielle, Tony, Jennifer and Elizabeth — with arguably more to come — the 29-year-old Regina native has figured out a way to keep her head while all about her are losing theirs and blaming it on anyone but themselves.

And, she got good news this week when she was again nominated for a best actress Canadian Screen Award for her role on the sci-fi hit.

Orphan Black returns in April with new episodes and new adversaries in the form of a set of clones played by Kingston, Ont. native Ari Millen.

Production is underway in Toronto. And while Millen, Caledon, Ont. actor Jordan Gavaris and co-creator John Fawcett appeared in person this past weekend, on an uncharacteristically wet, drizzly Southern California afternoon, Maslany stayed in Toronto and answered questions via satellite — strangely appropriate for a sci-fi thriller about cutting-edge technology gone wild.

Tatiana Maslany, left, and Ari Millen in Orphan Black

“The first season I felt very stressed and very intense, and I couldn’t let my guard down at any moment to have a laugh or anything, really,” Maslany said. “Now, it’s a little looser.”

Maslany still remembers her initial audition, when she was a relative unknown. Unknown to her, “little known” was exactly what producers Fawcett and Graeme Manson were looking for. That, and a chameleon-like ability to play different versions of the same role, but without letting the seams show.

“I played four different versions of the same woman at that audition — Beth, Sarah, Alison and Cosima,” Maslany recalled. “But then we introduced Helena midway through the season. And then later in the season we introduced Rachel. And in Season 2, we introduced Tomy and Jennifer. These characters all happened while we were shooting. I didn’t know about them beforehand. Luckily for me, John and Graeme and I have a very collaborative vibe on set. We talk about backstory. They ask me about where I see each character is coming from, or where I want to go. I’ve had a unique experience on this show — I’m able to give input and mould the characters my way, without it being all, ‘Do it this way, do it that way.’

“Initially, though, I had no idea. I didn’t know what I was getting into. I was excited about the prospect, though, of whatever it was going to be. Life is a challenge.”

“I don’t think any of us knew what we were getting into (with) Tat,” Fawcett said gently. “I really don’t.”

Maslany has grown into the roles in more ways than one. She’s older now, more mature, and with maturity comes wisdom and life perspective, knowing when to bear down and really concentrate, and when to kick back and let off steam, secure in the knowledge that she’ll be ready when called on.

“I guess it’s just surrendering to the craziness,” she said, with a gentle laugh. “And trusting that the audience will believe it if I believe it. I think Ari can speak to this, too, but it can be something as simple as just leaving the room for breath and not letting the technical aspect subsume and overwhelm must being there and alive in a scene.

“The one thing I try to do is surprise myself, even though I’m within this technical structure of marks and eye lines. It’s still just play. Even if I’m in a scene with special effects, I always try to do my work as if there’s an actor opposite me.

Tatiana Maslany in Orphan Black

“Often there is. I have Kathryn Alexandre, my clone double who does amazing work, who’s on the other side a lot of the time and gives me a full performance. So I do have that her work off as well.”

Television is a collaborative medium, in other words. To the extent that Maslany has made a name for herself as an actor of no small repute, she’s the first to admit there are always others who are an indelible part of the process, from the electricians and grips and makeup artists who make the day a little easier, all the way up to the writers, directors and other actors who shape the day’s scenes.

And hardly any of them look alike.

Orphan Black returns April 18, Space

Skyer Wexler, left, and Tatiana Maslany in Orphan Black

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/tatiana-maslany-finally-finds-the-funny-on-orphan-black-with-video/feed0Orphan BlackalxstrachanOrphan Black/SpaceOrphan Black/SpaceOrphan Black/SpaceOrphan Black/SpaceEndings are hard for Mad Men, onscreen and off (with video)http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/endings-are-hard-for-mad-men-onscreen-and-off-with-video
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/endings-are-hard-for-mad-men-onscreen-and-off-with-video#commentsMon, 12 Jan 2015 02:40:12 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=576138]]>PASADENA, Calif. — The long goodbye is almost over, and for Jon Hamm, Elisabeth Moss and the other familiar faces of Mad Men, the moment is suddenly very real. Hamm, sporting a neatly trimmed but still growing beard, and Moss, no longer the shy, awkward teen she resembled when Mad Men debuted in 2007, put on a collective brave face alongside their castmates Christina Hendricks, John Slattery, Vincent Kartheiser and January Jones, before a room full of reporters at the winter meeting of the Television Critics Association. There was a moment there, though, when, without warning and through all the quips, ribald jokes and witty retorts, Hamm and Moss suddenly teared up, before checking themselves and soldiering on.

It was that rarest of moments, when the Hollywood facade of superficiality and falsified feeling drops and the real emotion underneath is allowed to show.

Mad Men, one of the most recognized, honoured dramas of its time, was special. And when the final seven episodes finally air, at the beginning of April on AMC, there’ll be no going back. There will be no sequel. No spinoff — even if Hamm did quip at one point, off-the-cuff and on-the-fly: “Better Call Pete!”

When the final script was delivered, to each of their homes, each performer read it alone and with no distractions.

“I was surprised,” Moss said softly, hinting at how Mad Men ends but without wanting to give too much away. “I’ve been constantly surprised throughout the whole process by things I probably should have seen coming. But this time I was surprised in the best way. Like, just, really, really happy with it.”

She paused, and there was a sudden check in her voice.

Elisabeth Moss as Peggy Olson in Mad Men

“I wasn’t surprised at all,” Kartheiser suddenly said, touching Moss’ knee and coming to her rescue. “Actually, I don’t really remember if I was surprised or not. What was the question?”

Hamm laughed and shot Kartheiser a knowing look.

“I think anyone who watches will have their own individual response,” Kartheiser continued. “It won’t be a collective response. At least I hope not. Have we reached a point where we’re always supposed to have a mass mentality toward these things? No? Okay, good. That was a bad answer. Somebody else?”

“It was a Thursday afternoon,” Slattery said cagily, “That’s exactly when I read it.”

“I was surprised,” Jones said quietly. “I was pleasantly surprised. And I hope the audience is surprised, too.”

Jon Hamm in Mad Men

“I was pleased,” Hendricks said. “I thought there’s no way I can be happy. And I’m not sure why I felt the way I did — I mean, I know why I felt that — but I was pleased when I got the script.”

“Probably because of the robots and aliens,” Jones said.

“Yeah,” Hendricks said. “But then I thought, you know what? That makes sense. No, I was very, very pleased. And guess I was surprised, too. Who knew?”

“I remember, over the years, there was obviously all this secrecy about what was going to happen next on the show,” Slattery said.

“Toward the end, there were all these rumours. ‘How is it going to end? Do you know how it’s going to end? Does Hamm know how it’s going to end? Who knows?’ To echo what January just said, with those wisps of rumours in your head, you read that last script, thinking to yourself, ‘Let’s see if I was right or not.’ It was surprising to the end. It’s been surprising the whole time.”

John Slattery in Mad Men

“It was very hard,” Jones said quietly. “It was very emotional. I knew a little bit of what was going to happen, but those last few weeks I was a mess pretty much. Everyone will tell you. Anything made me cry. It was hard. It’s a beautiful story. It’s perfect in a way, and I read it over and over. I didn’t want it to be the last time. So sometimes I still read it once in a while, on a Thursday afternoon.”

“Creatively,” Hamm said, “getting to do what we did and what I got to do in playing this person, and tangentially, this amazing group of people that I got to know, became for better or worse, but mostly better, a significant part of my life. There are not a lot of jobs you can point to, at least in our world, that have that effect. This experience has been unequivocally wonderful, and I’ll miss it.”

Mad Men’s final episodes begin April 5, AMC

]]>http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/endings-are-hard-for-mad-men-onscreen-and-off-with-video/feed0Mad MenalxstrachanMad Men/AMCMad Men/AMCMad Men/AMCDiamonds and crystals are a girl’s best friend at the Golden Globeshttp://o.canada.com/entertainment/movies/diamonds-and-crystals-are-a-girls-best-friend-at-the-golden-globes
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/movies/diamonds-and-crystals-are-a-girls-best-friend-at-the-golden-globes#commentsMon, 12 Jan 2015 02:36:03 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=576134]]>If there is one trend that emerged early and built momentum on the red carpet at the Golden Globes Sunday evening, it was shine, preferably diamonds, but crystals, sequins, beads and lurex also worked.

It began with Naomi Watts in yellow Gucci with a stunning serpentine Bulgari choker, moved on to Amy Adams in periwinkle Versace with a Tiffany cuff and went on to the cool, contemporary Lorde in a black pantsuit with crop top and Neil Lane statement choker. All good – although we should not condone electric yellow – especially Lorde.

Jessica Chastain was also a winner, shining in a bronze molten halter gown by Versace.

But it was Claire Danes, not in any of the usual trends, who may have been the style standout of the evening, in a feathered fantasy by Valentino. “I am wearing art,” she said.

Crystals and sequins were the killer trends of the evening: Julianne Moore in a custom column by Givenchy (with a touch of superfluous feathers at the hem), Emma Stone in a crystal topped jumpsuit by Lanvin, Reese Witherspoon in wow Calvin Klein and Sienna Miller in a crystal-encrusted Miu Miu took top honours for wearing the trend with grace and/or charm.

And then there was J. Lo, in caped silver Zuhair with big hair, signature slit up to here and down to there, being, well, J. Lo. Honey, you have nothing to prove. Enough, already.

As for the red brigade, Girls Lena Dunham and Allison Williams shared the shade. Dunham, wearing Zac Posen, was at her best, despite raccoon eyes in a simple satin dress with cowl back, while Williams, usually a beacon of good taste on the red carpet, was very much the Christmas decoration in a ruffled red lavishly embellished gown by Armani Privé, and also sported those raccoon eyes.

Meanwhile, there was no orange for Taylor Schilling, but a subdued deep red keyhole neckline dress by Ralph Lauren and severely tied back hair. Too severe.

Christine Baranski was quite elegant in deep red Zac Posen, as was Julianna Margulies in a red tapestry strapless, accessorized and overshadowed by major, major Bulgari diamonds.

“Boyhood” won best movie, drama; best director for Linklater; and best supporting actress for Patricia Arquette. Perhaps the film’s top Oscar rival, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s “Birdman,” also fared well. It won best actor in a comedy or musical for its lead, Michael Keaton.

But in a shocker, “Birdman” was upset by Wes Anderson’s “Grand Budapest Hotel” for best film, comedy or musical. The film was Anderson’s biggest box office hit yet, but not an award season favourite.

Kicking off the show, hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler wasted no time in mocking some of Hollywood’s most tender subjects: the hacking of Sony Pictures over the North Korea comedy “The Interview” and the sexual assault allegations against Bill Cosby.

The hosts welcomed Hollywood’s “despicable, spoiled, minimally talented brats” to celebrate “all the movies that North Korea was OK with.” A North Korea government character, played by Margaret Cho, voiced her displeasure.

Last week’s terrorist attack in Paris at the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo hung heavily over the show. George Clooney and others wore “Je Suis Charlie” pins, and Helen Mirren was among the people holding up similar signs on the red carpet.

Hollywood Foreign Press Association President Theo Kingma drew a standing ovation for a speech pledging support of free speech “from North Korea to Paris.”

The hosts also relished their favourite target: Clooney. Of the night’s Cecil B. DeMille honoree, Fey suggested the lifetime achievement award might have been better off going to his new wife, human rights lawyer Amal Clooney.

The night had an orchestrated but carefree spirit, filled with the usual high dose of glamour, celebrity cameos (Prince!) and even the drink-swilling return of an old Globes villain, the former host Ricky Gervais.

The Russian entry “Leviathan” took best foreign language film. The DreamWorks sequel “How to Train Your Dragon 2″ took best animated film over the favourite, “The Lego Movie.” The Stephen Hawking biopic “The Theory of Everything” won best score for Johann Johannsson.

In one of the evening’s most hotly contested categories, best actor in a drama, Eddie Redmayne emerged as victorious for his performance as Stephen Hawking in “The Theory of Everything.”

Julianne Moore won best actress in a drama for her startling performance as an academic with early onset Alzheimer’s in “Still Alice.” Amy Adams surprised in taking best actress in a comedy or musical for her performance in “Big Eyes.”

As the only major awards show to honour both movies and TV, the Globes have also benefited from television’s rise.

Amazon, crashing the party like Netflix did before it, celebrated its first Golden Globes for the sexual identity comedy “Transparent,” winning best TV series, musical or comedy. The show’s star, Jeffery Tambor, landed best actor in the category, dedicating his award to the transgender community.

Actor Matt Bomer, winner of Best Supporting Actor in a Series, Miniseries, or Television Film for ‘The Normal Heart,’ poses in the press room during the 72nd Annual Golden Globe Awards. [Kevin Winter/Getty Images]

AMC’s adaptation of the Coen brothers’ acclaimed 1996 film, “Fargo,” came in the leading TV contender with five nominations and promptly won best miniseries or movie, as well as best actor, miniseries or movie, for Billy Bob Thornton.

The Globes have been on a terrific upswing in recent years. Last year’s awards drew 20.9 million viewers, the most since 2004. Accepting the Globe for best original song for “Glory” in the civil rights drama “Selma,” the rapper Common raised the status of the group behind the Globes even higher: “I want to thank God and the Hollywood Foreign Press.”

The Hollywood Foreign Press, a group of mostly freelance journalists, has lately cleaned up its reputation for idiosyncratic choices and awards swayed by celebrity. Last year, the HFPA chose the eventual Academy Awards best-picture winner, “12 Years a Slave,” as best drama and “American Hustle” as best comedy.